Bish, no surprise, I'm not finished in time, thanks for another great GB, I will get the Lightning done and posted soon…
Jack, yet again, such great work, all of the stages are superb how to lessons, picking up techniques left right and centre. Please make sure the undercarriage is strong enough to support this great piece of modelling!
Stik, the vampire is shaping up well, does look wierd without the tail booms on.
iSteve, That is a super finish, the paint has come up really well, and the decals do set in very well. The staining issue is a real bugger haven’t experienced it before, but one to watch out for. Very fine work on the canopy masking – great result. Interesting that you are using the Gunze without thinning, I use it thinned about 50/50 with either Taniya acrylic thinner or Gunze’s levelling lacquer thinner 400(for the gloss). Takes forever to set with the 400 though. I will look at your technique to see if I can improve my painting results. Good to see your tip for wax paper and worms, that could be a lot quicker than taping everything up.
TJ, very well done, ripper job on the plastic wooden wonder.
Gamera, I thought it was only me that does things like that…The finish looks fantastic, looking forward to a complete rig soon.
Bob, I like the desert camo on the ‘hawk.
AA, the diorama is looking great, looking forward to the finished product. Is the Albion lorry an Airfix kit? The detail in the Hurricane’s gun bays is really well done, and the figures look super.
Castel, sounds like a fast rig you’ve got. Even if it is not the latest, still a very good quality set up. I have got Campy Athena 11s on my carbon road bike, I'm not going back to Shimano, but Campy does need TLC.
Eric, Nice work with the black basing, I have followed down the same path for a Wyvern over in the Fleet Air Arm GB, I am finding it pretty labour intensive but a rich, deep finish. Like Jack says, I need to work out how to transfer the effect to the markings too. It must be taking you an absolute age on a model that size!
Thanks for the kind words guys, my issues with priming have been around getting an orange peel finish on the Vallejo Surface Primer (a gloss black primer). It is my issue I am sure, I need to take time from producing models and have a go at trying various mixes, pressures, flows and methods on a test piece to get a good gloss finish. May even unwrap the double action I bought five years ago, but haven’t tested out yet - trouble is there is barely enough time to complete the GBs I sign up for let alone all those I would like to do, but I’m not alone in that! Over Easter I upgraded the lighting in the shed where I airbrush, having identified that as one of my issues. I have also bought some of the Vallejo airbrush drying retarder since, and used it when I did the metal coats you see below. I think it helped?
After rubbing down the primer as best I could, I put on a coat of Vallejo metal effects Duraluminium. It went on really well, but did show up the orange peel in those spots where I couldn't reach with the emery paper.
A couple of days later, I had no trouble masking off a few panels and applying contrasting metallics.
I found that was a bit too contrasty though...
The middle of the wing is a mix of matt aluminium and the duraluminium. It came up looking like a slightly metallic grey though, so a mist coat was used to tone it all back in. Also did a few chrome highlight panels and a bit of variation in the belly. I'm pretty happy with teh effect.
So as you can see we are getting closer...