How to give a paint a bit of a metalic look?

General Discussion General Modeling Discussion
1

The instructions said to paint the lower part of the airplane white. I used Tamiya XF-2 white but it looks somehow too, well, flat white. Is it possible to somehow give it a bit of a metalic look? It is the Corsair II.

Thanks

2

Hello!

In general you can always mix a little silver into the paint. With white it can turn funny with the colour becoming something of a metallic gray, however…

In case of a Corsair II - AKA SLUFF - there are two options I can think of…

  1. NAVY - the underside should be reflective white, the colour meant to prevent the aircraft from being fried by the nuclear flash. For me the best option here would be to use white Tamiya primer from a spray can, works beautiful.

  2. Air Force - for a standard SEA camo the underside should actually be very light gray, and flat, so just dirty the white up a little and you’re good to go.

Hope it helps, have a nice day

Paweł

3

To my eye, most out-of-the-bottle whites and blacks (especially flats) are too stark when used in great amounts of a model. In the place of white I use a camouflage gray, which is a very very light gray. For black I will use a dark charcoal gray, aircraft interior black/NATO black.

4

Tamiya makes AS-20 Insignia White for Navy aircraft.

5

When you say metallic, do you mean having flakes of metal visible in the paint, or do you mean glossy? WW2 era aircraft paints were not glossy until late in the war when they no longer used the white under surfaces. Flat IS correct.

6

I agree, it will look like a pale aluminum not white.

7

Not flakes. Metalic shine/glossy

8

Thanks. I totally forgot about this one

9

No problem. Its sort of like the FS36622 camouflage grey color the Air Force uses, but its even a little bit lighter and not quite as brown. The other option you have is just to Navy-ize it by making it really grubby-looking. I made the mistake of using Tamiya XF-2 on the white parts of my F-14A, but the Navy-izing took care of that little problem. [H]

10

The Navy don’t use metallic white on their aircraft. As one poster already mentioned, use Insignia White and grubby it a bit. No such thing as a clean fighter jet in active service.