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Not usually one for in work threads, but figured I'd give it a go. Bare with me as I've already started this project last week and am hoping to actually have it wrapped up in the next day or so. Either way, maybe there's still some good gouge that can come of it. Here goes.
As stated in the title, this is the older monogram EA-6B. I'm actually building this for a guy who sent me the kit. Typically, I wouldn't have initially reached for this kit if I had the say so, but I work with what I have to go off of, and in this case, it's what he already had. He requested zero aftermarket (less some decals) so I'll be working exclusively OOB. Wasting no time, I immediately went to work doing like I typically do, which is getting as much built out of the gate as possible. I find that this gives me a great feeling of accomplishment early on in the build and allows me to really see what (if any) the problem areas will be. Rather than stall out straight out of the gate by spending an overly abundant amount of time detailing the cockpit, I'd rather get a lot of stuff up and running so that I can get a sense of the plane coming together. A quick test fit of the wings revealed that the wing joins actually weren't that bad at all. With the wide mass of the wing span, I was highly expecting some sort of warpage, or anomoly to rear it's ugly head. Upon mating the fuselage halves together, I did notice that there's an ugly trough aft of the cockpit, as well as on the overhang between the two crew stations. Why this exists, I'm not quite sure, but I did know that it was going to have to be addressed at a later time. Once I'd gotten as far as I could go with all the sub assemblies being pieced together, it was time to tackle the cockpit. For the record, I highly dislike the notion of having seats molded into cockpit tubs. Fortunately, it was only the cushions themselves, so I felt that I could work with that. I started with giving the tub a quick spray of medium gray to get everything up and running. Using a mixture of browns, and tans I was able to bring the seats to life by adding a bit of depth using lighter and darker colors of the original colors to offer up some depth and false lighting. I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed. Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
As stated in the title, this is the older monogram EA-6B. I'm actually building this for a guy who sent me the kit. Typically, I wouldn't have initially reached for this kit if I had the say so, but I work with what I have to go off of, and in this case, it's what he already had. He requested zero aftermarket (less some decals) so I'll be working exclusively OOB.
Wasting no time, I immediately went to work doing like I typically do, which is getting as much built out of the gate as possible. I find that this gives me a great feeling of accomplishment early on in the build and allows me to really see what (if any) the problem areas will be. Rather than stall out straight out of the gate by spending an overly abundant amount of time detailing the cockpit, I'd rather get a lot of stuff up and running so that I can get a sense of the plane coming together. A quick test fit of the wings revealed that the wing joins actually weren't that bad at all. With the wide mass of the wing span, I was highly expecting some sort of warpage, or anomoly to rear it's ugly head. Upon mating the fuselage halves together, I did notice that there's an ugly trough aft of the cockpit, as well as on the overhang between the two crew stations. Why this exists, I'm not quite sure, but I did know that it was going to have to be addressed at a later time. Once I'd gotten as far as I could go with all the sub assemblies being pieced together, it was time to tackle the cockpit. For the record, I highly dislike the notion of having seats molded into cockpit tubs. Fortunately, it was only the cushions themselves, so I felt that I could work with that. I started with giving the tub a quick spray of medium gray to get everything up and running. Using a mixture of browns, and tans I was able to bring the seats to life by adding a bit of depth using lighter and darker colors of the original colors to offer up some depth and false lighting. I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed. Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Wasting no time, I immediately went to work doing like I typically do, which is getting as much built out of the gate as possible. I find that this gives me a great feeling of accomplishment early on in the build and allows me to really see what (if any) the problem areas will be. Rather than stall out straight out of the gate by spending an overly abundant amount of time detailing the cockpit, I'd rather get a lot of stuff up and running so that I can get a sense of the plane coming together.
A quick test fit of the wings revealed that the wing joins actually weren't that bad at all. With the wide mass of the wing span, I was highly expecting some sort of warpage, or anomoly to rear it's ugly head. Upon mating the fuselage halves together, I did notice that there's an ugly trough aft of the cockpit, as well as on the overhang between the two crew stations. Why this exists, I'm not quite sure, but I did know that it was going to have to be addressed at a later time. Once I'd gotten as far as I could go with all the sub assemblies being pieced together, it was time to tackle the cockpit. For the record, I highly dislike the notion of having seats molded into cockpit tubs. Fortunately, it was only the cushions themselves, so I felt that I could work with that. I started with giving the tub a quick spray of medium gray to get everything up and running. Using a mixture of browns, and tans I was able to bring the seats to life by adding a bit of depth using lighter and darker colors of the original colors to offer up some depth and false lighting. I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed. Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
A quick test fit of the wings revealed that the wing joins actually weren't that bad at all. With the wide mass of the wing span, I was highly expecting some sort of warpage, or anomoly to rear it's ugly head. Upon mating the fuselage halves together, I did notice that there's an ugly trough aft of the cockpit, as well as on the overhang between the two crew stations. Why this exists, I'm not quite sure, but I did know that it was going to have to be addressed at a later time.
Once I'd gotten as far as I could go with all the sub assemblies being pieced together, it was time to tackle the cockpit. For the record, I highly dislike the notion of having seats molded into cockpit tubs. Fortunately, it was only the cushions themselves, so I felt that I could work with that. I started with giving the tub a quick spray of medium gray to get everything up and running. Using a mixture of browns, and tans I was able to bring the seats to life by adding a bit of depth using lighter and darker colors of the original colors to offer up some depth and false lighting. I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed. Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Once I'd gotten as far as I could go with all the sub assemblies being pieced together, it was time to tackle the cockpit. For the record, I highly dislike the notion of having seats molded into cockpit tubs. Fortunately, it was only the cushions themselves, so I felt that I could work with that. I started with giving the tub a quick spray of medium gray to get everything up and running. Using a mixture of browns, and tans I was able to bring the seats to life by adding a bit of depth using lighter and darker colors of the original colors to offer up some depth and false lighting.
I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed. Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
I pressed on further to push through the remainder of the cockpit. Although typical monogram quality, I was able to pull off some decent results by picking out all the knobs and buttons, and adding a bit of color to the seats and MFD's. I've since gone back and added a bit more color to the lines of the seat. All told, it looks busy enough to look believable, especially once installed.
Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful. Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Here I've finally detailed the aft bulkheads of the crew stations. I had to do some wiggling and adjusting once I got the cockpit installed to make sure they had a good tight fit, and were correctly angled. I thought this was going to be more of a chore than it actually turned out to be, and for that I was thankful.
Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist. I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Here, I've finally got the fuselage all buttoned up. I ran a few beads of CA glue on the inside of the fuselage join to add some reinforcement, and then hit it with accelerator to make sure it was locked in place. I prefer to do this any time I've got longer subjects like this that are forced to be joined down the middle, as it would really take almost nothing to split the two in half if hit or bumped hard enough later down the road. I've also added plastic card to the trenched area both behind and above the cockpit to start trying to rid of the indented areas. With this being an open cockpit display I've also marked the areas that'll need to be surgically removed to facilitate the canopies. I also laid down the base layers for the wheel bays since it's a lot easier to reach now with everything opened up. For gear bays, I first hit them with flat black, and then come back over with thinned white where I can build up the effect and add some false shadows. This , to me anyhow, gives wheel bays a bit of depth and some interest, instead of being brilliant white, which tends to hide any of the detail which may exist.
I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors. Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
I've finally gotten the entire fuselage cleaned up, which included adding the tailhook panel, the forward belly panel, which also included the nose gear bay. This had the chance to get tricky if not seated correctly, but I added a touch of glue to the forward part of the nose gear, and then used a scribe pick to pull some pressure towards the nose gear bay so that it would get a good adhesion to the structure itself, thus reducing any sort of gap issues in the nose gear bay. At this point, you can see where the card stock that was added around the cockpit area has been shaped and blended to match the contour of the spine. I initially thought that this would be a lot hard to do than it was since the area was in a bit of a "v" shape, but only a minor touch of Mr. Dissolved putty around the area was all that was required. I used a combination of the flex-i-file and careful blending with a medium sanding stick to get the contour to reappear without any noticeable deformed areas. Intakes were also thrown together and left to set, as well as throwing some paint, trim, and washes inside the gear doors.
Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light. At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Upon further inspection of the wing tip lights, I was left feeling a bit disappointed with the small area that they provided for the lighting so I elected to remedy that by removing them, and adding my own. I carefully filed out the existing molded lights and then shaped some clear sprue to sit flush in the recess. I drilled the back of the clear sprue to be used and added a bit of clear green and red to simulate a bulb and then glued them in place. Once dry, I used files and sanding sticks to shape them in place with the contour of the wing. In the end, this is a much better result than painting the plastic to try and resemble a light.
At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward. Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
At this point, the wings were ready to be set in place, hence making it come to life by resembling a Prowler. A quick install of the tail fairing, and I was officially ready to move forward.
Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after. After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Here, you can see the initial layer of paint has gone on. The areas that required filling and reshaping have disappeared leaving me with a convincing and clean replica of what I was going after.
After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting. While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
After base colors were laid down and I was happy with what she was looking like, I decided to move forward in adding tonal variations and elemental weathering using my airbrush. Just touches of lighter and darker areas along the aircraft went a long way into giving the eye something to notice when it comes to variable colors, which I feel helps capture the eye and convince it that it's looking at something interesting.
While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best. At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
While still using my airbrush, I wanted to go ahead and add a little more realism to the bird by adding different colors of gray along the aircraft to mimic weather, and maintenance touch ups. A blend of corrosion control blemishes were also added to help make it look like she was still receiving some TLC although she may not look her best.
At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with. Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
At this point, I knew I had a task ahead of me that I wasn't at all sure about, much less confident about. The canopies.... How was I going to replicate the irridium effect that's seen on the real plane? As someone who had, up to this point, never tried to tint canopies I felt a bit overhwhelmed. I hit Google to see what I could find, and for the most part the general concensus was to just use yellow food coloring, or gold paint to replicate the look. However, after looking at examples of people who had done this I was a bit shocked to discover that their canopies were....well...YELLOW!! Like, not just a little yellow, but full on bright yellow. I didn't want anything to do with that. The gentleman who commissioned me for this project told me in advance that there was a set of yellow tinted canopies that had already come with the kit, and while they were in fact tinted...they looked like aged plastic that had been sitting in an ashtry for a month. Not what I was wanting to go after. So, it was off to the lab to go into experimental mode. I broke out a spare F-16 canopy to test on, and after about three or four different trial runs, I think I was onto something. I liked the bronze effect that copper added, so I elected to go with that. Mixed with Tamiya smoke, I felt confident that this would be the result that I could work with.
Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them. Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like. Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
Here's the tint applied to the actual canopies of the prowler. The effect is very nice in that if you look at it in the right reflection, all you see is the tinted effect. However, if you put a finger on the inside of the canopy, you can instantly see it. Gives it a very space age appearance that I'm certain will look nice once the clear parts are framed with paint, and installed on the plane with the base colors to help contrast them.
Once I gave everything a look over and hit a few more spots with touch up paint, I was ready to seal the paint job and prepare for decals. While I had the chance to let the Future cure, I elected to test fit the canopies in place to see how it would look once the plane comes together, and it was quite nice. They will be open on this particular bird, but I felt this test fit would still be able to at least give me a bit of insight into what the final product would look like.
Moving right along, it was time to get all the tanks, and pods dressed up. Pylons were primed in black, and touched off with gray to give them a tonal variation, and wheels were masked, painted, and detailed to be ready to go. Gear and support struts have also been painted and detailed, and are now officially ready to be clear coated. Decals will be next.
I thank you for your time invested in this WIP, it's very well done, leaving no questions as to how you did things. This is a good learning tool and I'm taking mental notes. The canopy tinting looks very convincing and I'm filing this one for future referance.
I'm finally retired. Now time I got, money I don't.
That is coming along very nicely. I like the idea of tinting the canopy bronze. It looks quite good. Many moons ago, MANY moons, I built tons of cars and I would use real auto window tinting to tint the windows in the cars, it looked very good. I wonder if one could get some bronze reflective tint and apply it to the canopy? I haven't tried that approach but I'll give it a go the first chance I get. If you don't like it you can simply take it off with Windex.
Great work on the E6, your client will love it.
BK
On the bench:
A lot !! And I mean A LOT!!
2024 Kits on deck / in process / completed
14 / 5 / 2
Your attention to detail is superb, what a nice WIP you've created!
Toshi
On The Bench: Revell 1/48 B-25 Mitchell
Married to the most caring, loving, understanding, and beautiful wife in the world. Mrs. Toshi
Its looking good. I too have always wondered why kit manufacturers wont do decent tinted canopies when the subject called for it.
Brandon,
Did you use any special adhesive putting auto tint on? Ive kept some film scraps from the auto supply stores whenever I get my cars tinted but never really tried putting them onto anything. I have always thought about doing so, though.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers
allan Its looking good. I too have always wondered why kit manufacturers wont do decent tinted canopies when the subject called for it.
That's crazy! The same reason the parts don't come painted. It wouldnt be modeling!
Well, painting parts is one thing, tinting the canopy is quite another. For one, there are no off-the-shelf tint or tinting paint solutions, so modelers are left to fend for themselves. Its almost like saying decals shouldnt be provided at all.
Kit makers can always mold colored clear parts to match the subject. Even then, the modeler will still have to assemble and build.
allan For one, there are no off-the-shelf tint or tinting paint solutions, so modelers are left to fend for themselves.
For one, there are no off-the-shelf tint or tinting paint solutions, so modelers are left to fend for themselves.
The essence of being a modeler.
Not sure how well automotive tint would work. Gotta remember scale factor. . Maybe too dark.
I always did cars and cars have mostly flat glass. Planes on the other hand have compound glass and will present a challange to lay it down. As far as adhesive I would apply it just like on a car, a little soapy water, lay and squeegy it smooth. But on compound curves it's gonna fight you. As far as overall tint, you can get just about anything you want. Now that I think it over spraying it is probably the better method. It looks good, IMO.
Bk
http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/145088.aspx
http://www.swannysmodels.com/Tinting.html
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