Flat Coat Mystery

 Hi Greg, thanks a lot for your reply and your welcome! 

 I will have to take your advice and do a second gloss coat once I have put on the decals. Maybe that will help to look in the base colours I have before I hit them with the final flat coat. If I can figure out how to upload photos on here I will post a before and after  that gives an example of what I mean with the pre-shading suddenly showing through the camo main colours a little more than intended once I have put on the flat coat on.

Thanks for the reply oldermodelguy.  That’s interesting I didn’t know about heating up the rattle can to get better atomisation, I will definitely need to try that. I have done a lot of reading about flat coats and it seems to be an area that people struggle with. Years ago when I was in the hobby I used to just brush on the flat coat and it turned out okay to my teenage eyes!

Welcome to the forum. Sorry your first post has gone unanswered for so long, that should not have happened. I wonder if it is due to your question being a bit perplexing?

I hope now that Oldermodelerguy has bumped it, it might get some attention.

One thing I notice is typically I gloss coat, decal, and gloss coat again before washes. Seems like your washes went on pretty early.

It seems flat clear coats do change appearances of color, it's hard to tell from your description, which is quite good by the way, if something out of ordinary happened.

I hope we get more ideas here.

I meant to reply to this some time ago and forgot.

My take on this. Basically keep your flat coats as thin as possible. If using rattle cans heat the can up in a pan of hot water first, you will get better atomization and thinner coats. If one thin coat dulls it out to what you want then you're done as long as you got the coverage you wanted.