Beautiful progress, Harvey.
Would be awesome to see if you can add that sign as well.

I didn't quite hit my goal, but still not a huge amount left to do before some paint can finally be put on this big bird.

Firstly, the crew were painted. Not my best work, I may do some extra highlighting to make it look a bit more varied than green, it's pretty shiny due to the wash but I think I'll give it a matt coat later on.

The ejection seats were also played around with, they're almost finished but require two major pieces being the striped pull handles (which, naturally, is a pain in the rear to paint), after that they'll recieve a wash, some decals, and maybe a few handles and such painted different colours.

The canopy has been test fitted, I tried to paint the front glass a slight green/blue tint but wasn't able to. One interesting tidbit of information I discovered (but haven't verified if true) is that the design of the front glass of the F-14 allowed it to be extremely strong at high speeds, whereas the better visibility of the F-15 means that it can only go at its top speed for a limited time before the front glass begins to take considerable damage. Again, not sure if this is true, but interesting if it is! Regardless, painting the colour with the airbrush only caused issues and trying to remove it also caused issues, it needs a bit more cleanup.

The next step is to clear coat the crew, finish the seats and then button everything up. Hopefully I can do it tomorrow and get paint on by Wednesday at the latest, we shall see.

To me those pilots look great, Harvey.
Nice paintwork.

Quick update:

Thanks for following along folks, hopefully I can finally get paint on the Cat tonight. It's proving difficult to find good moments to get the stinky paints out.

The main components are on sticks and ready to get sprayed. I glued in and masked off the canopy, before spraying in tamiya black to make the insides the right colour. I'll be using grey primer on this as Mr.Surfacer 1500 is a little bit of a pain to get and I didn't find any black, that being said I find grey is better for actually seeing flaws so it's likely a good thing.

Nice masking and black application, my friend @scalerambush!
Looking forward to your next painting steps!

Normally I don't add them so early! But I figured that I can just fix what I break if any do break.. We shall see!

The cat has been primed white rather than grey, as I forgot I had a bottle of it. This'll make it easier to see what I'm painting when it comes to the 3 tones of grey. I'll do another coat of primer over the fuselage and take some pictures later. One issue I'm having is that my normal 'safe space' where I can put kits to dry without worry of dust collecting doesn't quite work on the Tomcat as its a bit too big, but a few polishing sticks will help.

Greeting folks, been a short while. Here's those photos of it primed in white, I'm having a little bit of an issue with one if the wheel wells which I thought was solved.

I painted the plane its first coat of grey with MRP paints over the fuselage and wings, this is the FS36375 Light Ghost Grey. It went on beautifully like expected, some dust appeared but this will be sanded down. I also need to fix that wheel well, if I had a time machine I'd do many things but one would be to approach that wheel well door differently.



Looking at reference photos I was expecting to do a very defined 3 tone scheme. Then looking at some refences photos of the particular airframe it seemed to be a more 2 tone scheme, but eventually I came across a few photos that show a subtle but viewable tiny section of the Medium Grey colour behind the RIO.



But that's getting ahead of myself, next up is to try and clear up the wheel doors and begin shading this Light Ghost Grey.

Also, I went to Duxford. Managed to get in a 1943 DeHavilland Dragon Rapide, turns out recently Armory Models announced a release of that plane in 1/48, I look forward to adding it to the stash.

2 additional images. Click to enlarge.