Hi all
As I said at the top this build has virtually finished the paint stage. So what you’ll see below on the Spitfire is as it will be – bar touching up the canopy window frames and a couple of other spots (109 to follow).
All in all whilst it’s far from perfect, I’m generally happy with how they went given I’m still new to this plane business.
The single biggest lesson for me was that planes are far less forgiving than armour when it comes to getting a good coverage – big wide flat areas and no little cooks and crannies you get with armour that can cause ‘shadows’ aka “I missed a spot”…..
Also I think I need to keep my nails trimmed….I had a few instances where I managed to scrape little bits of paint off when working on masking etc. I’m managed to patch them though and fortunately all bar one was on the underside and so won’t be seen much.
Masking generally went ok but more about that later……
The biggest plus of all though was my AB and the how smoothly it went.
By way of background I first got some cheap Chinese ones Spring 2018 with the compressor I bought. They worked ok and certainly gave me good experience of stripping an AB down without risking damaging something more expensive. However, due to my domestic set up they only came out a handful of times until lockdown. As a result I was still running into the odd serious issue, although by that time I had a better one (
Tamiya 0.2mm Superfine). But as lockdown has progressed things have got slowly better. And then just before getting these I invested in a Sparmax (0.4mm). For these two kits it just seemed to really click. I had almost no problems at all and even then nothing major, so it really was a joy.
All comments welcome as usual.
ATB
Andrew
-------------------------------------------------------------
Primer
I currently use Vallejo (why is for another time) but their grey is virtually identical to
Airfix grey plastic and so I added some black primer so I could see where I was spraying. It was too much though, so it was darker than I wanted. However, whilst this meant it took a few coats to get proper coverage, it has meant the panel lines haven’t completely merged away. It looked even darker in real life
Exhausts
I tried a technique I’ve been using for tracks and other pieces of bare metal and I think they work ok. The technique goes like this:
- Black Vallejo primer – normally brush painted
- a light wash of Humbrol 53 Gun Metal (enamel)
- then a wash, or two, or three of an off black/very dark brown made from a mix of Revell acrylic Dark Earth and Black
- where a warn/rust effect is required follow with a light wash of some of Life Color’s rust colours (acrylic).
The effect can be varied to an almost infinite degree depending on how heavy the enamel wash is, how many coats of off black you do and what, if any, rust colours you use.
An example of a 'clean' metal finish
The finished exhausts
Camo
I was paranoid with the paint lifting as I masked and unmasked but actually I had none of that at all – either I was very good or very lucky. I was very careful though to give the paint plenty of time to dry and I used a suggestion (Barry I think) of de-tacking the tape a bit on fingers too.
I initially tried using blue tac sausages to mask for the green but I really struggled with it for some reason and as you’ll see my initial effort left far too much brown showing and wasn’t very close to the original. So i then scanned the instructions in, blew the picture up to the right size, printed it off, traced an outline on an acetate sheet, lay masking tape over the top, traced over it, cut it our and voila! It sounds a bit of a faff but the blue tac was a real struggle, seemed to take a long time and looked a bit meh….
There a couple of points where you can just see a paint join under an optivisor but from two or three feet aware they’re invisible. Also I de-tacked the tape too much in places so there was a bit of bleeding but again the touch ups are all but invisible unless you get the light just right and certainly not from a normal viewing distance.
As I said I still have a couple touch ups to do, which the camera picked up.
So all in all, not an entirely smooth process and certainly not a perfect finish but for my first effort I’m reasonably happy – the big thing is I know where I went wrong.
Remasking for the second coat of Dark Green gives you an idea of how bad my first attempt was.
The final paint job
Just noticed that I still have to touch up the tyres
Although I'm actually confident I can get it completed in time for once.
2018-04-08
IMG_20200720_101115
.
You don't get that with quick build tanks!!
