i can show what i have been working on. last spring i bought a couple of dragon 1/72 golden wing series kits. this is the last of them. the f4f-4. i am using this as kind of a test bed for some ideas. when i began this i wanted an open pit. however after spending a great deal of time working the pit and adding a great deal of stuff i test fitted the canopy and found out that the only way i can display this is with a closed pit. i also tried something new for me on the wings. i first dryfitted them and then used tamiya thin cement and worked them until the seam looked like it had disappeared. i have been fascinated with the work of others with preshading but i am not good enough to paint the lines so i went one step further. i painted the entire plane gloss black for the primer.
well without more talk, pics.
whatcha think.
can i be accepted back into the a/c forum now? huh? please
You’re welcome anywhere Joe. It’s a nice build. I hate to say anything, and I’m not an expert, but the white bottom looks like it comes up a little to high. I have always thought the demarcation line went straight back like on the Hellcat, with a white shadow under the tail. I don’t know if you have a picture like this, and as we always say, buiild it how you like. Just my [2c]
Looks real good, Joe. I also like the tri color scheme.
Kinda think by spraying the whole thing black defeats the purpose of pre shading, it becomes a primer at that point. If you are going to pre-shade, you don’t have to have exact straight lines. Just a lite hand on the airbrush.
well thankyou all for the kind comments. the painting was done off the instructions and we all know how accurate instructions are. (did i really say that) the black preshading didnt work as well as i thought it would on this one. but i messed up when i painted it. i mixed the paint too thick. next time i have to remember to keep the mixture a bit thinner.
[#welcome] Hi Joe, you are always welcome here my friend[tup]
Real nice build you have there, I like the tri-colour scheme and it looks fine to me.
Thanks for sharing with us and keep on building,
Hiya Joe,
OOooooooo, the Wildcat… One of my all time favorite Navy birds of WWII. BOY…you have come along way my friend.
She is really turning great. What markings are you going to put her in??
Joe, as for your primer, try thinning your paint a little more. Thats what I do when I prime my a/c flat black.
Hey wibhi2,
I do not think that the primer defeats the purpose… I feel you have to try it out a few times… It does take some practice but the out come is very nice.
Then again we are all different in our ways of modeling and thats what makes it great about our hobby[;)]
Flaps up, Mike
Mike
Yes, in Joe’s picture, the bottom color looks light gray. But by spec, it’s SUPPOSED to be white. If it is gray, the plans are wrong. It would explain the demarcation line, however. As I stated in my first post, I’m not an expert. But it is a subject I’m really interested in. I don’t like to make comments on other people’s. I was afraid I might have put my foot in my mouth to begin with. I went back and checked my sources and the internet, and couldn’t find many tri-color schemes. I did find several where this color line works very well if it is the blue gray/light gray scheme. The Monogram Navy colors book, 1940-1949, uses an F4F to illustrate the tri-color countershading/countershadowing scheme, and that is what I was going by. Jooe’s work is fine, and the original reason for the pictures was pre shading
The reason I’m going through all this is because someone posted their work a while back. It looked like they did a good job putting the kit together, and the paint job is nice, but the scheme is wrong, BY SPEC. There may be a picture of this a/c somewhere just like it is painted, but I have never seen one. No one mentioned this, and it is now in their signature. I cringe when I see it, but haven’t said anything until now. I’ sure they are happy with it, and that is what matters most.
Wayne’s passing mention that someone painted a plane a certain way “because they might have seen one that way” brings up an important point for less experienced modelers.
DO NOT take your camera to an airshow expecting to take research photos for painting WW II or Korean War aircraft, or anything else that’s not modern and in the active inventory. Why? Because even though these people are rich enough to buy the plane, and to spend another half a million bucks having some shop restore it out at Mojave or wherever, they won’t spend fifty bucks on a copy of the appropriate volume of the Monogram Publishing Painting Guide to Navy (or Army Air Corps) aircraft (This series, not related to the model company, is the Bible of historical painting and markings, and is used by the Smithsonian, the USAF and Navy museums, and serious modelers. The paint chips in the back are outstanding. So if you can find it, jump on every volume you can).
I have seen T-6’s at Oshkosh with elements of markings from no fewer than four different generations of planes from three wars on ONE plane. Even museums do this. I was a researcher for the Confederate Air Force museum in the early 80s, and my boss and I finally gave up staying up all night poring over old documents and photos to get the perfect colors and markings because those guys with the authority or the checkbooks were going to paint these aircraft any way they liked using their favorite colors. The alleged PBJ-1J “Devil Dog”, which everyone has seen at air shows or the museum, is a case in point. No Marine Corps PBJ-1 (the Navy version of the B-25) ever was painted even remotely like that often-photographed warbird. The Lone Star Flight Museum is another whose colors are, for the most part, absurd.
If these people are so concerned about preserving our historical aviation heritage, why not take a little extra time – that’s all that’s required, not money – and make these planes look like they did when they fought the Nazi’s and Japanese? If you notice British warbirds, they don’t seem to have the same problem. They take historical accuracy seriously (of course, there are always exceptions), but in America, making it shiny and pretty seems more important than making it real. We don’t paint the Battleship Missouri red, white and blue now that it’s a floating museum. Why do that to our treasured heritage of flight?
Sorry for all this ranting, but it’s something that has been a bee in my bonnet for a long time.
TOM
wayne please dont take my reply as harsh, it wasnt meant that way. in what experience i have the instructions on painting have been less than accurate in most cases. i in no way intended to sound like i was slaming you. i painted the white on the underside but due to the black priming it didnt come out very good. and my picture does look gray. i appreciated the comment and thankyou for it.
tom you are so right. i have seen a number of redone birds that have paint schemes that seem very very off to me. you make some good points.
Joe
I don’t think your reply is or was harsh, and I hope you don’t think there was anything personal in any of mine. The caps in my second post were just for emphasis of the point, not attitude. I could see it was white, or meant to be and thought I was explaining my reasoning to Mike. Sorry, again.
no problems then. i did find a cool wildcat with this sceme in a book. going to have to scan the pic. when i first painted it i though it looked harsh but the real thing is even worse. it is a neat little scheme but very harsh to the eyes.
