**** DONE: 1/48 F6F-3N Hellcat - Night War of WWII

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That must be the mother of pre-shading, with the airbrush out of action, I take it this was done by hand.

I have a couple of back-up airbrushes and used my Paasche V for the mottled pre-shading. My V can actually shoot finer than my Iwata and I use it for detailed spraying like this. I'm going to test my Hataka paints with my Paasche H this morning to see if I can get the white on.
 
Back in business with the arrival of my nozzle replacement. So tiny!
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Couldn't get the Hataka Insignia White to spray worth a damn so I just mixed my own using Tamiya paints.
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Masked off some panels and sprayed them with a slightly different shade of white to give the paint job a little tonal variation.
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Here is a closeup of the starboard wing bottom. Pictures don't show it well since the effect is subtle but you can see the effects of the preshading.
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The camo work can begin. I used masks cut from paper and affixed with blobs of BluTack to achieve the demarcation between the white and intermediate blue. The Intermediate Blue was an old bottle of Gunze-Sangyo that I had laying around.
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The dark blue was mixed using different Tamiya colors. Primarily Royal Blue with German Grey but some other colors thrown in there as well.
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Note the bumpy texture of the paint in the area underneath the cockpit. This is deformation caused by the hairspray chipping method. Hopefully, I can tone it down after the gloss coat.
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Paint chipping is a mixture of the hairspray method and silver pencil.
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A gloss coat is put on in advance of the decaling.
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Thanks gentlemen! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I finished the decaling today. Not as simple as I had hoped but she's done. Some of the Owl decals gave me some trouble... they were a little brittle and resistant to Microsol. Maybe Solvaset would've saved me some work but I've yet to pick some up so I had to make do with what I had. The lower wing stars/bars that encroach into the radome fixture gave me the most problems. Owl gives you a standard stars/bars and a separate curved decal, presumably to go over the curved radome but with no directions. The curved piece was too long for the job and did not have a bordered end, so I had to do some post-application surgery of wet decals to make it work. Plus the decal cracked in couple of places so that had to be touched up.
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I opted to replace the rest of the Owl stars/bars with the kit decals hoping that they'd go on a little better. They did but I still had to "coax" them to get them settled into the panel lines. The coaxing was a bit forceful and involved scribing the decals along the panel lines with a sharp knife and then pressing the decals into the recesses using edges of pieces of paper. I need to find another way to deal with stubborn decals as the cutting method often yields some sloppy results.
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The decals were sealed with a thin gloss coat. I'll have to do some minor paint/decal touchups next and then its weathering time!
 

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