TAmiya 1/32 Corsair - Seeking advice painting/weathering

Hi all,

I am working on my first plane, a Tamiya Corsair. I’m not totally satisfied with how my preshading and panels turned out. Also, I used the kits suggested blending for the deep blue but seems off to me. In part I am wondering if I should be a little more bold with the paint coats going on top of the shading? I did 3-4 coats but I am thinking it’s masking the shading too much and maybe I need 3 very light coats. Lastly any tips to avoid the look of the airbrush stimpling?




A couple of things that I did when I built the Tamiya F4U-1 Bird Cage Corsair in 1/32.

I sprayed the inner wing upper surfaces with a mix of aluminum and green zinc chromate, and then chipped at it to expose that paint. Also, Corsairs were notorious for leaking fuel/oil right in front of the cockpit.

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Great build. Do you have a build thread?

I think it looks good. You have to remember that you don’t have the decals on and haven’t done the post decal weathering steps. If you want to add more panel line shading, you can use enamel panel line accent paint or a weathering pencil.

And, it’s complicated as we can only look at our computer monitors, and how they are rendering your photos, which means our opinions all wind up with at least one asterisk.

It does not help that the blue in the Fleet varied from very new to very old pretty quickly, only really differing in how much wear was seen. Only about a third of the air wing spent time on the hangar deck, and they rotated out to Flight Ops on a regular basis. There was an entire “dance” on the straight-deck carriers as the wing was massed either aft for launching, or forward for recovery operations.
Do you have enough shading? Dunno. I’m too far back from your project. It’s down to the refernce photos you are relying upon.

@Sgmartz There might still be a thread where I posted all the photos of the finished build, but I didn’t do a work in progress thread.