After about 20 years, I am just now getting back into modeling. Love the aircraft and detailing the cockpits are my favorite. I am from the old school where I would paint the control panels flat black and then use a white leaded pencil to highlight the details. I am now finding paint “markers” available in the art supply stores. They look like colored markers, only they are paint. They are offered in different sizes from fine to wide. Before investing in buying any of these, I was curious has anyone tried using these to highlight the buttons and scopes on the control panels? If so, any tips in using these?
I’ve used them, silver markers. They do work, however, I find that they are a bit too ‘runny’ to use directly from the pen. It’s easy to have paint flow over the raised edges. They do make a much brighter edge than silver pencils though. So I’ve mostly went back to silver pencil, decals, or PE. I do use the pen for doing chipped paint on wing root and props though.
I keep a supply of several types of markers. One neat trick is to use lighter colors, like in highlighters, to cover chrome parts in car kits. Make gold or other color anodize appearance, or other metallic coatings. Blue markers over silver/aluminum paint makes the anodized blue on fuel line fittings.
I sort of lucked out a bit in this but figured I’d post my recent experience with it. I painted the cockpit instrument panel flat black, then after that dried, I took a brush and dipped it in silver paint then brushed it on paper a few times to get the runny paint off, then lightly brushed it over the instrument panel and iti came off perfect. Only the raised instrumentation got the silver which was how it should be.
Well done, You discovered a new -to you- trick. Now, you can feel confident in using that technique on other areas like landing gear bays etc. Using a lighter color of the "base"color will bring those details to light even if your using black with a slightly lighter dark gray for the accent,for instance.
This past week, i was rummaging aroung in JoAnns Fabrics. They had Sharpie OIL-Based paint markers in an .5mm tip and a fine and medium tip. Bought a couple and love them.The red is perfect for the red switch covers on panels, they also have yellow, green, white etc. You can order online, too. About a 1.50 each.
I thought about using a Sharpie to get crisp lines on the glass cockpit canopies, but then when I tried it, the black came out with a purple hue to it.
