A light wash of artist oil paints has been applied to the cockpit tub to help highlight the molded in detail. Notice the wash color in the corners of the tub bottom and around the A/C vents on the back wall.
The sidewall has also received the wash and as you can see it gives the part more depth (and realism in my opinion).
With the Milliput dry, the Tamiya basic putty is applied to allow final blending of all remaining gaps and seams.
Up until now, I have been quite happy with the detail provided by Tamiya in the kit. When I turned my attention to the HUD and UFC assembly, I was quite disappointed. As I will be displaying the model with an open canopy, I could not live with Tamiya’s poor excuse for a HUD and UFC. Here we see on the left, the parts as provided by Tamiya. On the right, after some re-work is the assembly with new PE part for the UFC (Up Front Controller) and resin parts for the HUD frame. The kit parts were also thinned down to give a more realistic scale look. It just goes to show that even Tamiya benefits from a little TLC. (…and yes Greg, I realise this is not out-of-the-box).
I have had people refer to my modeling as “tidy”. I had not really thought about it that way, but I do like to avoid making work for myself. One good example is minimising overspray. Here I am ready to paint the black surrounds of the cockpit and have roughly masked the surrounding sections to minimise (not avoid completely) overspray. Yes I could just spray the black and clean up the overspray (or ignore it perhaps), but I think that is actually more work than taking 1 minute to apply some tape like this.
The black has been applied (btw, it’s a mixture of Tamiya Nato Black and Pure Black) and the tape removed. I hope you can see my point about reducing overspray and more importantly about saving myself the work of cleaning up a mess I did not need to create in the first place :-)
The intakes (fore and aft) have now received their final color coat (Humbrol H130 Satin White). I am generally happy with the intake, but have learned a few things along the way, so I expect my next Tamiya F-16 to go more smoothly.