Greetings everyone – after your encouragement about my A-7 Corsair, I decided to attempt this F-18 Hornet.
I really like how the cockpit came out – its not as good as some of the ones I see on here obviously, but it’s probably the best cockpit I had done:
Of course, once I put the canopy on, I sprayed a gloss coat down and it made the canopy blurry, and now I can’t see any of the detail – haha!
My big experiment with this model was to try to use a wash to bring out the recessed panel lines (I’ve never done this before). This failed miserably. I bought a pre-made wash, but it just got messy, didn’t settle in the lines, and when I tried to wipe away excess, it just smeared everywhere.
So, I then tried to use a micron pen in the lines, and at first it was putting too much ink in and made everything blurry – but it ended up giving a sort of “wind-swept” look that I kindof like:
I know there’s some problems here, but I did learn a lot with this one. Any advice or thoughts on better ways to do this would be appreciated. Thanks!
Looks pretty good, really, like a bird at the end of the cruise. I wonder if your gloss coat was a matt coat or semi-gloss? Sounds like it had too much tooth for the weathering.
That was a nice " happy accident" on your wash attempt and I like the look of it. As Don said, it probly was your gloss coat that gave you the fuzzies. I use Testor’s Gloss laquer sprayed on b4 the wash and have had very little problems with the wash. Also the wash has to be a different kind of paint than the base coat ie. enamel or oil wash over acrylic etc. A little tip from your Uncle Jay; Leave the canopy masking on until the last possible moment, that way nothing gets on the clear glass but the future coat. Removing the canopy mask is probly the last thing I do before calling the model done.
I tried using Vallejo acrylic wash on panel lines and failed miserably. More than once. I then switched to cheapo oil-paint from a tube purchased at Michael’s and that worked great. Sometimes the old methods are the best.
Needless to say, as much as I like Vallejo’s paint, I’m less than impressed with their acrylic wash.
Great looking, nicely weathered Super Bug! don’t sell yourself short, thats wonderful looking. How was the kit going together? I hope my second kit completed after restarting comes out looking that nice.
Good looking Hornet. You have a coule options for raised panel lines. You can rescribe them then sand off the raised ones (very time consuming). I’ve heard of guys who pre-shade with a dark color and then sand very lightly along the panel lines to knock off the topcoat color and allow the preshade to show through, I haven’t tried this as I"m so hamfisted I’d probably sand the panel line right off. You can also try a wash on these as the color will bunch against the raised lines, but you can end up with a dark line on either side, or you can just use a pencil or your ink pen and go over them after the painting is done. Good luck!
