Prime Day 2

Evening folks, after the initial primer coat I sprayed on a second one to patch up the sanded areas. For this I used the standard Mr.Surfacer 1500 grey so you can really see the difference between the out of bottle colour versus the leftover primer bottle. I then sprayed a very thinned down coat which helps produce a smooth finish.

Painting the Undersides

Thunderbolts, like seemingly most WWII subjects, seem to have a whole variety of paints that could be viable. I started off painting the undersides of both models in a US Neutral Grey. Despite arguments of British colours being used here, the photos show Razorbacks being often (not always) far darker underneath than the Bubbletops that were repainted as Tom pointed out.

I started painting this before remembering that I have montex masks to use, so painted the areas of the markings in white before going through the process. Thunderbolts in the ETO often had a star beneath both wings opposed to the standard of having them on the underside of the right wing, for this a variety of sizes were used ranging from the standard 35inch marking, all the way to 55 or 60inch markings. There are also some photos of aircraft having a mixed layout. Without a photo of Eileen showing the underside, I decided to go for one 55inch and one regular as it's quite unique.

With that out of the way, I began shading the grey. First with a darkened mix of black and the grey over the panel lines, followed by a mix with white for the insides of the panels. The Bubbletop was the subject of more painting questions as the RAF aircraft were supposed delivered in camouflage made of American equivalents (the same way FAA Corsairs were painted at the factory), but were then repainted in RAF colours in India. It seems that the standard Medium Sea Grey was often used, but some photos including the only original colour photo I could find show it being considerably darker leading me to think it was US Neutral Grey. Thankfully, due to the 'Jungle Queen' photo, it definitely seems this is an RAF Medium Sea Grey due to the tone which is a shame as I quite like how the P-47 at RAF Hendon looks in the darker grey underbelly. Regardless, I mixed XF-1 White and XF-83 Medium Sea Grey together to colour the insides of the panels.

Next up is to paint over the entire underside with the base Neutral Grey on the Razorback to tone down some parts, and the Bubbletop gets a coat of XF-83 for the same reason.

This is great work on the shading, Harvey @scalerambush

This is really excellent paintwork, Harvey @scalerambush
Defintely wrote your approach in my notebook.

Thank you again you two! Had a spare day today so the airbrush and compressor have been on overtime today.

Painting the Dark Green

With the model blu-tacked off into how I wanted, it was time to paint the green. Ideally it would be best to do it the same way I did the brown, but in my infinite wisdom of trying to forgo a paint layer I basically did it in reverse but got the same result.

First I painted the panel lines in XF-82 Dark Green fairly heavily mixed with black. I then originally intended to paint a little MRP's Olive Drab (which honestly seems way too light a colour) for weathering, but in the end decided to fully cover all the brown paint with this. I then brought out MRP's BS235 NATO Green, a paint bought for a failed Puma HC.1 project that I hadn't used before. This colour was a little darker and used to shade the now green panels in different ways. Finally a quite heavily thinned XF-82 Dark Green was used to tie it all together.

Essentially this resulted in the same result as when I did the brown, but in a weird order. Whatever works!

I removed the blu-tack, and for the most part this was fine but a few issues were visible. Most issues were centred around the fuselage, where between the brown and green being painted the blu-tack had been pushed upwards so there was a line where the green didn't meet the underside grey. This was fixed with more paint.

I then attached those elevators, and leant the model upside down whilst they dried. Somehow during this process I scraped the left wing so some more quick painting fixes were needed.

Painting the White Identification Markings

Now for the white. Same process as before but with two colours, insignia white and Ukrainian Su-27 Grey. The grey was accidently sent to me but the company sent the correct replacement, and whilst it's tempting to do a Ukrainian model subject at this current time I know its just not where my modelling interests lie and so this grey gets used as a nice light grey primer to block off the areas.

I then shaded the centres of panels with insignia white, then realised I forgot to mask off the elevators. That's a job for tomorrow though! I like how this is looking so far but the white will get a final coat to tone in the shades a bit more between the grey panel lines and white centres.

The bands on the tailplane were 18inches, which is the same size as D-Day stripe on a single engine aircraft, which conveniently turns into 0.95mm in 1/48, which to me a nice piece of 10mm Tamiya Tape will solve nicely (and will be how I do the D-Day stripes on the other Thunderbolt). The wing bands are 24inches, which surely must be by design as it lines up perfectly with that access panel to the machine-guns and their ejection ports, so masking is super simple. You may notice that the right upper wing is looking a bit more reasonable, whilst this isn't quite how I wanted it I did start to tone the white and grey together before deciding it best to tone every band at the same time rather than paint one start to finish after another. Looking at that photo the stripes look like they are angled for some reason when they aren't.

Great progress on the camouflage, Harvey @scalerambush
Eagerly waiting to see all that masking being removed.

Nice progress on both, my friend @scslerambush! Olive "drabbing" the green was a great idea!

Thank you both! I'm surprised the paint didn't build up against the tape here honestly, I think the large reason for this is slightly more patience in doing thin coats and letting it dry for a minute before a subsequent one which I often forget to do. It's easy to look at some colours, particularly the white, and think nothing is happening and to just spray more which I have done time and time again but that just causes issues.

Invasion Stripes, and Regular Stripes

Good amount of work done on the razorback over the last couple days, most notably the invasion stripes. Firstly though, I masked off the invasion stripes and the identification stripes. P-47s and P-51s often had identification stripes across the wings, elevators and rudders to help prevent friendly fire, apparently a particular concern was the P-47 being mistaken for a FW-190 though I've never delved into whether this is true or not. Regardless, I painted these the exact same way the previous P-47 got the white identification markings. They were given a slightly weathered appearance and used the same grey base and then MRP Insignia white.

The stripes got some extra work on them. The wings were given a layer of gloss and then chipping fluid, I didn't bother with the fuselage though. As mentioned, the 9.5mm 1/48 scale D-Day stripes is close enough to 10mm Tamiya tape in my books, so the wings were easy enough to get right due to the straight sides. The fuselage was a bit more challenging due to the curve, but across both sides I used tape to measure out the distance on the flat part of the fuselage and then connected it with 1mm Tamiya tape which is small enough to curve nicely, and then filled in the gaps with tape.

White was first painted on, but I wanted to give it the look of more recent paint than the tail markings so I used Tamiya's XF-1, thinned 50/50 with X-20A, and given a nice amount of Mr.Color Leveling Thinner to further keep it smooth. Tamiya's colour is a pure white, whereas the MRP Insignia White I've been using so far is more dirty as this colour is actually the underside colour seen on the very early 1941-1942 US Navy two-tone scheme but sprays a bit nicer. Fortunately though, whilst white is generally a bit of a problematic paint I think the Leveling Thinner really helped out here and there are 0 issues with it.

After this I masked off and used Tamiya black for the black stripes.

Removing the masks revealed some problem areas, unsurprisingly, but these were patched up. The tape did also pull up some paint from chipping fluid wings but nothing major, unfortunately the blue on the US insignias is having a really bad time and pulling up a lot. I think this is due to be not giving the blue enough time to originally dry before I put the stencils on it so it is a bit compromised and weak.

I then chipped those stripes on the wings akin to what I can see in those images shared early on in this build, focusing on the leading edge of the wingtip and the bomb racks. Finally the flaps were also done, the white was painted on earlier but with all the masking removed I could just put them in place and line up the tape for the black.
The good thing with invasion stripes at least is that perfect isn't a concern. Sure, these aren't June 4th stripes where the orders just been given and everything needs to be painted on every plane ready for the invasion tomorrow on June 5th (which was obviously delayed an extra day), so lets get the broomsticks. I love those messy stripes and you can see them on my older Tempest build, but even so these stripes aren't perfect in photos and you can see some wobbly bits. Even 'Snafu', a P-47 that has been a good deal of help with reference photos, isn't perfect.

The Checkerboard Cowl

As mentioned earlier, I had planned to mask off the cowling for the stripes which I reckon I could do but the effort seemed to far outweigh what I really wanted to do, at least for this aircraft which isn't planned on being beaten up. I instead went on and used the Tamiya decals provided with the 'Bubbletop' (to make it clear, the Razorback Tamiya kit doesn't come with the checkerboard decals but the bubbletop does have another bird from the same squadron as 'Eileen').

Firstly I cut down the decals as much as possible, no extra carrier film to be seen, the cuts and grooves to assist them fold were cut out, and I further cut down to the next square along to help them fold easier. I got to applying them starting with the topside decal, and gave it plenty of decal setter.

Some issues came up with the topside struggling to curve over, so I cut the remaining 2 decals down further from the grooves from 1 square down to 2. Although I'd may not have actually done anything I did apply some light heat to the decals as they were setting as this is apparently meant to help them curve, not sure if this is true but I can't say it made it any worse.

With plenty of setter solution I let it dry for a bit before absolutely drowning the thing in softener. I found that for some reason the Mr.Mark Softener has less of an effect than the Micro-Sol, despite it meaning to be the stronger of the two. Regardless a healthy amount of Micro-Sol applied with a rather wide brush and left to dry for a few hours drastically fixed up the decals, a second and third coat went even further, and I'm still applying coats every couple hours right now.

Naturally they're not perfect, there are a fair amount of rips and tears but I think it's more than reasonable for such a complex and big marking. Nothing that can't be fixed with some brush paints. I'm definitely glad I painted it white before using the decals though.

With that the next steps on this Thunderbolt is to give it a gloss coat and stop any more chipping, and then patch up those issues on the markings. After that I can get on with decals.

Just to mention: Normally with these models I do a 1/500 or 1/350 shutter speed on the camera, particularly on this Thunderbolt I find a 1/350 get a good result in terms of colours looking close to how they do in my eyes. On the RAF Thunderbolt I was using a 1/750 to show off the brown weathering or 1/1000 to be able to show off the white, so you'll just have to imagine there's some weathering and shading to the stripes on the tail. There is a degree of weathering on the D-Day stripes but intentionally a lot softer as I wanted it to come across as newer paint, but I doubt this'll ever show up on the camera!

Great work Harvey, despite the all too common setbacks. I'm working to finish up a Tamiya F4D-1, all decals were the 20 year old box decals.. though thick, MicroSol really sets them down good. Its strange that some solutions work in favor of others, so at least you found the correct one in this case.
Loving the paint work on both examples.