Progress report.
Lots of masking and painting has taken place over the past week - mostly masking (which is not my favourite part of the hobby...). Anyhoo, the result is as follows. Getting the curve for the blue was a real pain in the a*se. I do have a fancy circle cutter doovey but getting the right curve onto the fuselage around the various bits that poke out was quite the challenge. While doing this I also realised I stuffed up the location of the white circles on the fuselage sides - they are about 1.5mm too far forward, which meant the blue fuselage band position needed adjusting. I could have redone the white base and the grey for a third time but not too many people will pick up on it (outside this forum that is...). The colour of the blue itself is a mix of a couple of different blues from the Vallejo range, I did write it down somewhere but I cant seem to find the piece of paper momentarily. I looked a the colours from two other builds (one on this site from
javlin
and one by Brett Green on his website) but think they both are a bit too light. I went for a tiny bit darker shade and I have to say I am pleased with the result.
A close examination will reveal that I will need to touch up the white circles where I had some tiny bleeding under the tape, not a big deal but still irritating.
Next up I applied a red tail fin flash. Like both the grey and the blue I wanted to do some pre-shading to provide some subtle contrast to the final colour. You have to look closely but some delineation between the fin ribs and the fabric in between is there.
Finally, I managed to cut some very small swastikas from photo frisket film to finish off the tail. I know I could have just cut them out from the full tail-fin flash decals but I wanted to see how well I could create the stencil and then paint it without ruining the job to date.
Like the blue I was pretty chuffed with the outcome. They will need some tiny touch ups (along with the white background) but they came out pretty neat and I even got them centred in the white circle backgrounds - happy as!!
Next steps will be all the small touch-ups that I see are required, mostly for the white circles (as already noted) and also for the red tail fin flash where it wraps around the front. I didn't manage to get as clean a wrap around with the flexible masking tape as I would have liked. No big deal - just another touch up to add to the list.
Thanks to all that pop in for a look and/or comments. This one is ticking along slowly but at least I am getting small amounts done nearly every week. Its been very enjoyable up until now, we'll see how that feeling goes once we get to putting the top wing on!
Cheers!