Hi everyone!
If you look at a picture of an aircraft with a natural metal finish, you’ll see that the metal isn’t perfectly clean and uniform. It has streaks, scratches, a general mottled look overall. Has anyone ever recreated these phenomena on their NMF aircraft or seen it done? Any pointers on how one could recreate this look?
Thanks!!
Eric
I inadvertantly stained Alclad! Something came loose, so I glued the part with CA, and applied some CA accelerator to the area. The accelerator put a big stain on the area! I assume with some testing and practice one might turn this to advantage. I apply exhaust and gunsmoke stains over aclad just like I do for regular paints. For the checkerboard panel appearance there or two methods. You can actually mask off and apply different shades of Alclad. Or, you can undercoat some of the panels with something other than gloss black. The color and shine of the color underneath has a big effect on the alclad appearance.
Thanks Don! I wonder how well that CA accelerator would work. That’s precisely the kind of stains I was talking about rather than the “patchwork” look of the individual panels. I was looking at a picture of an F-101B back before they were painted. The metal had scuff marks from being walked on, rained on, maybe even bird poop! That part was hard to tell but there were definitely streaks from everyday use and the weather. I was just wondering if anyone had ever replicated stuff like that on their NMF planes.
Eric
Never tried this, but the alclad coat has to be VERY thin. So, if you used a tiny bit of medium sandpaper to “sand” a scuff into the black undercoat, I would think that would show through the Alclad and look like a scuff. I’ll have to experiment with that.
I would be careful with the CA accelerator. It may produce a cool looking stain today, but may continue to work and look pretty funky a year from now. Also, are we talking about staining on a metallic paint finish or those models that come chrome plated (yuck). Because, staining on a painted metal finish isn’t much different than weathering any other painted finish. Use a thin wash, drybrushing, weathering powders. Those coupled with varying panel shading should give you exactly what you want. Another of my favorites is to first paint some areas a slightly different shade than your intended finish, put on some random slivers of masking, then do your normal painting and remove mask when done. That produces some nice scrapes.
Watch what solvent yio use in a wash over alclads. I used one that was too strong snd it took the paint with it. I use daler and rowney low odour thinners GENTLY. Pastels work well. For panel lines i used fabercastell artists pens. They are ink based i think, and stain alclads too so are ok for oil marks. Wipe it off quick where you dont want it though. They come in a wide range of tones, i use the grey ones.
I did a Tamiya P-51 with the body done will the aluminum bare metal foil. The foil has a “grain” to it that reflects light slightly differently from different angles, so if you alter the direction of the panels (pick an arbitrary “north” on the sheet of foil and run some pieces of foil north-south, others east-west, even NE-SW, etc. on your model) it gives you that slightly patchwork look. I based mine with black on the exterior, and then just cut my foil pieces at the panel lines. I was tedious, but looks great. Afterwards you can dry brush or pastel until you are content.