Thanks for the comments everyone!
Wonderful work that you carry so far
John.
Taking notes to take account of. Very interesting painting process, I will be pending as you do. I want to know well the technique of hairspray so that it can practice in my future birds.
Felicidades y saludos cordiales
SANCER
Thank you Sancer! I'm not an expert at this hairspray method. I've got some decent results using it but have also experienced some inconsistency. I prefer it to the salt method for a few reasons. One is the effect itself, which is quite realistic and much finer than can be achieved with salt. The other is flexibility. With the salt method, the salt crystals determine where the chipping occurs. It's a bit difficult to visualize (at least for me) what the chipping is going to look like but once you lay the salt down, you're stuck with the results. The hairspray method allows you to build up the effect gradually. You can work on it, set it down and come back later and chip some more if necessary.
Back to the Hayate. Before chipping, I highlighted some panels with lighter shades of the main grey/brown colors. Just to give the single color a bit more depth.
Here is the underside...
Yellow ID panels added to the front of the wings...
The main idea behind the hairspray method is the creation of an unstable, water-soluble layer between the metallic finish and outer color using hairspray. The application of water combined with gentle brush action dissolves the hairspray and the outer color will begin to disintegrate in tiny pieces revealing the metallic finish in a (hopefully) realistic fashion. Because of circumstance, the primary chipping work on my Hayate was delayed to two days after the outer colors were applied. I was curious to see how that would affect the chipping procedure since the outer acrylic coat would be fully cured.
Using a small paintbrush dipped in water, I picked a small area underneath the canopy on the port side and started brushing. Brush brush brush... rub rub rub. Nothing. After a good five minutes of increasingly vigorous brushing, I could see no chipping! A few thoughts ran through my head at this point. (1) Is the Gunze-Sangyo paint that I used for the upper brown color somehow impervious to the hairspray method? (2) Do you need to perform hairspray chipping BEFORE the paint fully cures? Dismayed, I wiped off the water to regroup. That's when I realized that there was a very subtle chipping effect in that area that was difficult to see when the surface was wet. Whatever the cause(s), paint chipping WAS possible but it took a very long time, spread out over three sessions.
Initial effort... can you see the very slight chipping under the masked cockpit opening?
Another session on the starboard side...
More progressive chipping... despite the level of effort expended (or maybe BECAUSE OF IT), the chipping effect is finer and more limited in scale than I originally intended. The chipping on the yellow ID bands was most difficult since it was over an additional coat of paint. My poor paintbrush now looks like an angry porcupine.
I'm guessing that it would be near impossible to chip the hinomarus (which will be made of two separate layers of white and red paint) so any chipping there will have to be using another method.
Final note for this entry... the Alclad finish on the bottom of the plane was totally useless... I forgot to spray the bottom with hairspray!