Painting a large model

Last night I rattle canned the bottom of the B-52. Forgot how much I like rattle cans. It kind of overwhelmed my homemade paint evacuation system. ( a 20'' box fan duct taped into its box with the front cut into doors and opened out to seal the window frame and the back cut into doors with top and bottom panels added to create a booth.)

Don Stauffer

Spray cans put on a pretty thick coat of paint.  Pre-shading tends to get pretty well covered up with rattle can paint.

If you have not used a can before, don't start right off painting the model with it.  Find some scrap plastic and use the spray can on that until you get the hang of it.  Since you cannot adjust anything, distance from nozzle to surface, and the speed of movement of the can, are important.

Also, be careful on a large model.  The cans cool down due to Joule-Thompson cooling, and that drops the pressure after awhile, and that reduction in pressure can screw up your spraying.  If the can gets cold, stop.

 

 

 

Not if you spray in several light coats they don't go on thick. If panel lines are the issue, as someone mentioned, do it in sections. 

You gotta admit, a 1/72 scale B-52 is a large kit with wingspan running close to almost under 3 feet. I should know because I did one back in the day.

Mars - I don't know if you'd be interested in trying this, but for the very large models I have painted them in sections. Using a low tack painters tape and some paper, I would spray say the fuselage, then the tail surfaces, then the wings. The tape allows masking of the individual bits, spray what you want, let the paint dry overnight, then mask those painted for spraying other components.

It's even OK to mask at panel lines etc, for making even smaller areas to spray, avoiding getting too much area to cover evenly. Using either an airbrush or spray can, then trying to paint a very large model all at once never really worked well for me, I ended up with a very rough and pebbly surface. Masking for smaller areas did work well though.

Hope it works out well for you.

Patrick

Spray cans put on a pretty thick coat of paint.  Pre-shading tends to get pretty well covered up with rattle can paint.

If you have not used a can before, don't start right off painting the model with it.  Find some scrap plastic and use the spray can on that until you get the hang of it.  Since you cannot adjust anything, distance from nozzle to surface, and the speed of movement of the can, are important.

Also, be careful on a large model.  The cans cool down due to Joule-Thompson cooling, and that drops the pressure after awhile, and that reduction in pressure can screw up your spraying.  If the can gets cold, stop.

I built that 1/72 scale B-52 back in the 80s and yes, that is one big aircraft kit. I used a rattle can spray paint to paint the kit. 

Hello!

I don't know how you feel about it, but maybe you should try to preshade that model? To do that you would have to first paint darker colour (not necessarily black!) along the panel lines and then you try to fill in the panel centers. This way you get nice shading that makes your model more interesting from far away and you are painting smaller areas at a time.

Then again, to paint bigger areas you can always try to thin your paint a little more, crank up the air pressure a little and then move your airbrush farther away from the painted surface - this way you have a chance for more coverage.

Good luck with your build and post some pictures - have a nice day

Paweł