Thanks, everyone! I appreciate the discussion on RLM colors even though I’m sure many of you have had it a hundred times [:D]. And thanks for all the kind words. This has been a fun build so far, so I’m glad you’re all enjoying it.
I got some time with it this weekend and put down the last gloss coat, then a panel line wash.
I wanted to dirty this one up a bit because I feel like most of my builds have been pretty clean, and I liked the dirt on my Hurricane, so why not try something new? I decided to do salt weathering. I practiced on the underside, using a mixture of water and dish soap brushed onto the plane to hold the salt in place (the dish soap is just to break the surface tension of the water and keep it from beading up on the gloss coat.
Then I dumped salt all over it. I didn’t have cheap sea salt, so I ended up using some of the fancier stuff [whstl].
I let it dry (mostly) before laying down a highly thinned coat of Tamiya smoke, which was probably too thin, as it seems to have had very little effect, if any. I then hinned some flat earth and shot it over the salt. Once that had dried, I blew off the salt with the airbrush (no paint) and then, for the parts that were stuck on, I wiped in the direction of airflow with a paper towel.
Here is the result:
I decided that while I went a little heavy in a few places, I really liked the random weathering and dirtiness, especially for a dive bomber working at low altitudes and flying through a bunch of debris, smoke and dust from planes in front of it.
Up top, I didn’t like how stark the contrast was in the splinter camo, and how bright white the sweet Cartograf decals were, so I sprayed a REALLY thin mist coat of RLM 02 over the whole topside. Then I revisited the salt technique and used the black green color, hoping it would further tone down the contrast between the two as well as darken bits of the darker patches now that they’d been somewhat lightened with RLM 02. I thought the look was too subtle, so I salted it again and then hit it with a thinned coat of NATO black, sinc eit has a greenish tint to it.
Here is the result (kind of hard to see in the lighting, and it’s a lot more cleaned up around crew walkway and wing root now):
Once that was all done, I wiped the plane with a damp paper towel to remove salt residue and clear coated it with Tamiya flat clear. I missed a few spots with the salt, but I used a Q-tip with Tamiya acrylic thinner to remove the staining (it didn’t eat through the Alclad lacquer gloss coat into the colors below, so all is well).
I’ve now added a bunch of the little bits like dive flaps (which I’m glad I cut off and left till the end), control surface linkage, counterweights and those sorts of things.
I also used a short-bristled brush to smash some silver on the leading edge of the wings and the nose cone to simulate paint shipping there.
Now all that’s left is some exhaust streaking, chipping around the wing root and final touch up around the canopy. Oh, and the ordnance.
-BD-
