Paint has begun to be put on the model. Many people view that white and black are the hardest colours to weather and I absolutely agree, on one hand this is made worse as a significant portion of the plane is these colours, on the other hand its a bit easier as its not the whole plane so I'm not too fussed how good a job this is.
Basically, if I was to do a night fighter that was all black I'd take more care here, but for me all I did was paint the access panels and gun ports a slightly different colour. The white I used the Mr Surfacer 1500 primer, and painted a mix of XF-1 white and XF-19 sky grey on some panels. Mixing this in a 1ml white to 0.1ml grey still made this paint change colour considerably, I'm not too sure how much I like it but it does give the eye something more than pure white to look at and I'll happily spray over these with white after I see how the clear coat tones it down.
For the black, the same thing was done. After masking the halves off I painted it over in several thin coats of XF-2 black, before adding a 50/50 eyeballed mix of XF-2 and XF-69 NATO black. Once again, this gives the eye something a bit different to look at. At the moment it looks shiny but that's due to the paint not being fully try and a clear coat once again will done that down.
I didn't feel the need to do my usual panel tonal weathering on this as I felt adding any more colour would turn the white into light grey looking, and the black into dark grey looking. It's one of those difficult areas where you want to apply something to keep it interesting to the eye but these two colours/shades are so easy to lose with conventional painting. Either way I'll be painting this to be a relatively clean aircraft so this is more than enough I think.
Next up is to mask off and do the same on the other Spitfire, then I'll paint the brown on the upper surfaces. I'm not sure how I'll do the camouflage as I normally use the blu-tack worms for this, but I may use paper stencils to keep both aircraft looking similar.
I also mixed up a Tamiya paint mix I found on another forum ages ago, I'll see how they look but they don't at the moment look too much different to how they did unmixed.
3 additional images. Click to enlarge.
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1. This antenna wire post has been bent, bent to shape, bent, bent to shape probably 30 times and it is still hanging on by a thread, lets see if it survives.
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