Evening folks, it's been a minute!
Work has mostly gone towards Eduard's Zero, but with that wrapped up time to get back to the Hellcat.
Painting Vraciu's Cat
Quite a lot has gone on, firstly the model was primed, some issues were highlighted notably on the underside which were patched up a bit better. After this I applied some pre-shading.
Unfortunately my trusty 0.2mm airbrush died on me, well... Died because of me really. Butterfingers caused me to break the nozzle, but the 0.35 I've seldom used aside from primer and clear coats in the past year is working out nice enough.
With the white done I applied a pre-shading to the fuselage after using blue-tack to mask off the white.
And then the intermediate blue was painted.
And finally the process was again repeated for the sea blue.
And when all is removed we have a painted up Hellcat! No major issues here, perhaps the lines between the paint could be feathered a bit nicer but with the 0.2mm out of commission for a while until the replacement parts arrive I won't be trying that. Some bits were tidied up and resprayed where needed but not much.
On the right side a few weird bits are here, firstly that little divit in the blue. I'm not sure about it and it's likely just shadow but it does seem the sea blue dips down around the access port. Also, the cowl flap camouflage shouldn't line up with the fuselage according to the photo as you can see. Perhaps the entire cowling was a line above the fuselage, but I just did the sole cowl flap. These are both things that are easily fixed.
As much as I'd like to give it a clear coat I think I'll hold on and see how long the 0.2mm airbrush parts take to arrive, whilst some Hellcats have a very clear sharp line it's obvious that Vraciu's didn't.
