USS America Aircraft Carrier CVA/CV66

This is a Micro Ace (ARRI, No. A131) 1/800 scale kit I built for a work colleague about 10 years ago, whose boyfriend served on the American carrier. It's the USS America Aircraft Carrier, CV-66. It's about 16-1/2" long.

 

It was the first naval vessel I'd built since the 1970's, and the biggest. I don't know how old the kit was, but it was definitely several years old....I've thrown away the box long ago. She's a beautiful carrier, and I wanted to do it justice by mounting it on brass finials (on a temporary wood base).

 

It was a challenging one, in that it was an older kit and the large pieces were a tad warped. But still, It was a fun build and nostalgic in many ways. 

The decals for the flight deck were lacking in a big way, so I ended up hand-painting the majority of what you see here....

 

 

 

I wanted to make the flight deck look wet, so I used FolkArt acrylic paint, hand mixed, which had a gloss included in it. The thought was a wet deck at sea. This was in the beginning days of my recently into model bipuilding, and I’d not yet bought an airbrush, nor experienced any real success with brush painting Tamiya Acrylics; these craft acrylics paints were more along the lines of the medium I used in college art school, with mixing and textures. I liked the results.