It's been a while, sorry life in general has got the better of me and model building has taken a back seat. I have been getting all the replies in this build so have still been in touch, great bunch of members here!
I started the Arrii kit, it's a fairly basic kit and I'm doing it straight out the box. My last contact here showed the poor clear bits - the canopy parts were anything but clear. I have a couple of options here - clean them up with micro mesh, build my own from clearplastic, get an aftermarket one,or raid some of my other kits - it might be a combination of these.
This build was always going to be experimental, even more so when I looked at the state of the decals, and the Arri instruction sheet was pretty to difficult to fathom out when it came to colour scheme.
I have now made some progress, here are some pics:
Decided to paint on the decals, so a bit of white primer and flat white was laid down as a base, then masked
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Masking lifted the white on one of the underside crosses, have some repair work to do here, not for the first time. Have found some spare decals so might just use them here although not the correct size
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Here's the original decals and you can see why I'm not using them
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Compared with my painted option, the white comes out nicely
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I have used Model Master Swarzgrau for the upper surface colours and mottle spots, just added some white for the lighter grey. The underside is Model Master Underside Blue with a touch of white added. The painted decals have some rough edges and the mottle has some overspray but will do for now, mission accomplished.
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Apart from the decals the decals no masking was used, did this all freehand. I used my Paasche H for the underside and first attempt on the upper surfaces. There was a lot of overspray on the upper scheme so redid this with my troublesome Iwata gravity feed which I haven't used in along while. The finer nozzle did a tidy job.
As mentioned earlier this was experimental and am satisfied with these results. Next to fix up the underwing crosses then apply the first dull cote before weathering and all the fiddly bits
Thanks for looking, will hopefully put this one to bed during the course of this week