SEARCH FINESCALE.COM

Enter keywords or a search phrase below:

Best painting aircraft upper surface camouflage patterns techniques?

779 views
2 replies
1 rating 2 rating 3 rating 4 rating 5 rating
  • Member since
    March 2020
Best painting aircraft upper surface camouflage patterns techniques?
Posted by cantgrowup on Monday, April 20, 2020 1:40 PM

I'm 64 years old and have been building since age 6.  But after a 5-year hiatus, I'm ready to tackle my unbuilt kit stash.  I have always struggled with airbrush painting upper surface camouflage patterns on aircraft.  I've taped, free-handed, cut paper masks, and mixtures of each, but my hands aren't as steady anymore, and my patience is definitely getting shorter.  What is the best method for getting a historically correct pattern painted while maintaining correct feathered edges, preventing overspray, etc.?  I've tried scaled-up instructions on Xerox machines before, cut out the patterns,  and taped them down.  I've tried suspending these masks off the surface using rolled out putty.  The end results have always been acceptable to me... but I'm ready to learn from the masters.

Is there a link to a video or DVD I could buy showing the best fool-proof methods, and hopefully the simplest (although I realize that those two parameters are probably mutually exclusive)?

Thanks

  • Member since
    November 2018
Posted by oldermodelguy on Monday, April 20, 2020 1:50 PM

I can't tell you what "the best" way is but I can say that if you support your airbrush hand with your free hand you will get far more accurate with it. You can see free hand airbrush artists do this or even T shirt artists. And it works for both airbrush and paint brush.  Helps at least. You can look up some airbrush art videos at you tube as well as I can so I won't run down a link for ya unless you get stuck lol .

  • Member since
    May 2009
  • From: Poland
Posted by Pawel on Monday, April 20, 2020 6:19 PM

Hello!

My favourite technique is to use rolled "worms" of blue-tac on the edge of the mask for a feathered colour edge. And you can adjust the diameter of the "worm" - the wider the worm, the wider the colour transition. This can be combined with paper masks cut from copied and scaled instructions. It's just that such paper masks only work for surfaces like wing top or flat fuselage sides. On surfaces like curved fuselage top or wing root I lay out my "worms" looking for specific points like inspection hatches, panel lines and such, and then I fill the surface to be masked with triangles cut from a masking tape - and this doesn't have to be the finest tape as it rarely even touches the model, it's suspended by the "worms".

Then, when spraying, try to stay perpendicular to the model surface, and not spray under the "worms".

And let's not overdo the fethered edge. On a 1:1 Mi-24 Hind in Polish service in the nineties the transtion between colours was 1-2 inches wide. That's not even a milimeter in 1:72, so on a model the transition should be almost invisible. Of course we don't want a "wall" as is sometimes left when you put a thick layer of paint next to the masking tape edge. In the "worms" method there's no such edge, so the colour transitions are always nice.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your painting!

Paweł

All comments and critique welcomed. Thanks for your honest opinions!

www.vietnam.net.pl

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!

Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.

SEARCH FORUMS
FREE NEWSLETTER
By signing up you may also receive reader surveys and occasional special offers. We do not sell, rent or trade our email lists. View our Privacy Policy.