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Masking
Personally I don’t really enjoy this part of the build but it is critical to get a good finish so time spent on this stage will pay off later. Firstly grey was sprayed on the lower surfaces in several very thin layers building up the depth of colour but stopping before the pre shading is lost. The preshading can be quite stark as it will tone down after the Klear and matt coats. Once the grey was dry (not that long – I do like acrylic paints!!) the lower surface was masked off and the brown was applied. Once the base brown was down some white was added to the remaining brown in the airbrush cup and this was sprayed into the centre of the panels. Further white can be added to give more shades and when this was done I sprayed a much thinned coat over the entire surface to both blend the shades together and to give a ‘sun bleached’ effect. The camouflage pattern was then masked off using the Blu-Tac method and the green was post shaded using the same method as for the brown. Once the masking was removed I also rubbed away the Maskol on the wing roots to expose the metal underneath – it looks well worn which was the effect I wanted.
Now I normally advocate always starting with the lightest colour first when spraying but in this case I’ve made an exception for the white identification stripes. White is normally a very difficult colour to spray and get good coverage but there is a way round this. Tamiya White primer gives excellent cover and when decanted into an airbrush its coverage can be controlled a lot better than spraying from the can. You can also get some variation in the white to break it up.
