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.
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.
Hi,
dark colors such as the Navy Blue or the AK Sea Blue I used on my Tamiya F4U-1A 1/32 tend to make preshading almost unnoticeable at least under certain lighting conditions and angles. Try to use a lighter shade of blue (just add some white drops to the blue you used) and airbrush very thinned (at least 1:2) and low pressure just in the central areas of the panels…
Then I used Flory Models wash and oils to enance panels lines and further add tonal variation to the panel. For the underwing surfaces just use oil wash for panels and grime/dirt and streaks.
And as someone else also wrote above, the Corsair had these typical streaks/stains coming form the refueling area in front of the cockpit.
