Nice presentation of the polished blades and the painted spinner.

Talking about weathering, Woody !
This is spectacular!

Woody, @wkubacki
I like how you have painted layers upon which you will be chipping. I have done that several times in the past, once with a Tamiya F4U-1, and another time on a Tamiya Ki-84 "Frank", both being in 1/48 scale. The Ki-84 is probably more like a 1/50 scale, but it was good enough to make it into a Fine Scale Modelling magazine many years ago.

I think it brings extra realism to the table when you are trying to weather the finish on your build. Real paint wears off from the outer layer downwards, or if it chips away for any reason, you will always find a different color underneath the top coat, or bare metal will be present if it completely chips off.

I really like what you have done here. I have been thinking about keeping the Empire of Japan up and running, without having a set end date in sight.

Like many of us here on Imodeler, we have more Japanese kits to build, and not enough time to build them in.
This becomes a stress to some when the deadline is getting close. If I do leave it as is without an ending, it will allow others to keep on building.

Thanks for posting the latest updates. Your A6M is looking very good.

Next up was the cowl, which I painted Mr Color SM201 Silver, then C125 Cowling Color and chipped around the fasteners and the leading edge. Then I tackled the undersides with a layer of marbling with flat white and some buff, and topped off with a thin coat of AK RC 303 J3 SP and moved on to the chipping. Because of the size of the plane I couldn't just dunk it in water, so I laid a damp shop towel on the belly to activate the hairspray below (red primer/hairspray/marbling/blend coat).

I proceeded with the chipping of the belly (stones/sand blasting from the rough island airfield surface), but went a little too far. No matter, I could simply paint over the areas I didn't like...but, what's that? Did the water somehow stain the paint? Interesting. Maybe its the hard water at my house? I have learned that AK RC stains easily, but this is the first time I have noticed. Perhaps it's only certain colours? Anyways, I painted over the excess chipping and the stains, although I didn't completely cover the stains and used them to add some variation to the paint.

10 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Your painting skills are among the best I've seen, Woody!
This is some spectacular painting!

Upper side paint is on. AK RC305 thinned 80/20 with MLT. I find black basing such dark colours very hard to get varying tones, without it looking unrealistic. Also, if you spray too much of the top coat you end up erasing the marbling. I think what I have now is good, but it is only the first step in weathering the plane.

Oh, and I realized why I was having so much trouble chipping. I wasn’t using the correct hairspray, which in this case is Tresemme number 3 medium hold. I was surprised how easy it went this time, in fact the paint came off almost too easy. I’m not sure if that is also due to the fact that I sprayed a very thin coat of paint. Either way I’m happy I don’t have to beat the poor model to bits to get some paint to lift.

Anyways, enough jibber jabber, here are the photos . Tomorrow I hope to start on the hinomaru.

5 attached images. Click to enlarge.

I’m kind of stuck with the weathering and will need to explore some techniques to get a bit of the worn and faded look (nothing too crazy though). But that’s for later, marking and then the stencil decals and any touch ups and then possibly post shading and lots of oil work.

Thanks for the compliments guys

Thanks Spiros @fiveten, it make look like this is effortless for me, but I can tell you it is not. There are a lot of missteps and do overs and swearing during my builds. A lot can be traced to trying to hurry up or skip steps, which never speeds the build along and only sets it back.

Case in point, I cut the masks for the hinomaru out of Oramask 813 and applied them to the model. I had issues with the tight curves of the fuselage and wing root fairing, which I didn’t pay enough attention to... well , I would pay for that later. First I masked the entire disc and sprayed it with a random coat of off white (C69) to get some variation in the coming coat of red. Then I sprayed red using the specific Hinomaru red C385 (C327 is a very close match to this) thinned with MRT 75/25 to slowly build up the colour and depth and not bleed under the masks.

8 attached images. Click to enlarge.