**** DONE: 1/48 Bf 109G6 - Winter War / Eastern Front WWII

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Good stuff. Ive used several times rolled masking tape and the closer it is to the subject the harder the line is. Doing a Vietnam SEA USAF camo you want a very soft edge. much of the WWII stuff is hard to near hard. Your airbrushing is quite good and I think you underestimate your self. Oh BTW when you get to working on a model try to put the engineer away and enjoy your self.
 
Slam said:
Gents, have a good look at Wurger's post #69. If there was a yellow fuselage band, it appears to have been over-painted. That paint job just got more interesting...
Click to expand...

Good catch there, Slam. need to dig into that band further and see what to do.
 
Hey, Guys,
Ok, I started experimenting with the soft edge ideas using "offset" masking. Here is a bit of a tutorial on what I did and some initial results.

I started with blue tack (about 1.5inch length) - pic 1. I then rolled three pieces out between two tiles - pic 2. I am calling them BT1-BT3, one being smallest, 3 being the largest. I made every attempt to get a uniform roll for all three thicknesses. When pressing these on, I made every attempt to minimize the "squish" effect on the blue tack. I used the same mask/BT# across the 2 different air pressure settings to minimize any distortion of the blue tack involved in "re-pressing" the BT/mask pair.

I then cut 3 identical masks from some post it note (pic 3 is the mask on BT1). I then used the following parameters:
Paint thinned 40%
Air pressure at 18 psi and 25 psi
Varied the BT worms from BT1 to BT3 as annotated on the card stock.

I used neutral grey and faded OD (I had the most of these in the bins. As you can see (I hope), and no surprise here, the larger BT worms had the biggest impact on the softened edges with BT1 having the "smallest" soft edge and BT3 having the "largest" soft edge.

All painting was done at the same distance and the same angle from the table top ( well as best as my eyes could pull it off). All sweeps back and forth were done in a straight line versus swinging in an arc. Everything was sprayed with my Paasche Millenium Dbl Action airbrush with the same tip/needle combination.
Pics below:

Pic 1


Pic 2


Pic 3


Results Pics:





 
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As above - good tutorial. One thing is very important: always spray across the masked edge at a constant angle. I find that straight onto an edge works for me. It's very easy to get ghosting from overspray swirling under the mask, especially where surface details raise its edge, and that's a dead giveaway as to the technique used. Your 4th pic shows this. But your 5th is bang on - perfect edge and no ghosting.
 
Wurger said:
As I had said earlier the thicker mask the softer line.
Click to expand...

Yeah, Wurger. I was not surprised at all. I just wanted to put something together for the newer folks to learn from. After getting the samples under the mag lite, I am liking the effects from BT2. The think the "size" of the soft edge will work on the 109. BT3 seems to big for the 109. BT1 seems to hard.

I need to experiment some more with free hand stuff for the fuse sides and the various subtle splotching applied. Also, I am still trying to decide on the yellow ID band versus overspray. I have one pic that clearly shows the band but only one side and not the top of the fuse. I tried scanning it in, but the quality is horrible. I will try a pic of the reference to see if that comes out better.
 
JKim said:
Thank you for posting those masking examples. It gives me a good idea of how to approach my paint job.
Click to expand...

Glad I could be of some help with that lil tutorial. Hope it all goes well with you. I have the base coat of the lighter grey on the wings now. I am sitting back at this point and thinking through a "strategy" for lack of a better word. I will try to add detailed comments once I start. But, things like how to mask off one area of the wing such that I can get a soft edge across 3 sides of a "box like" area of the darker grey. I am thinking I will have to use a two stage masking sequence to ensure I do not inadvertently spray a hard edge on one side will doing the other two sides. Things like that are what I am talking about. I hope to start on the wings with the darker grey tonight. So, hopefully, some pics tonight or tomorrow.
 
Well, I told you all things would slow down dramatically as I got into the painting. I have the wings and horizontal stabs done now. All in all, I am rather happy with how things came out. Oh, and I did freehand the horizontal stabs. I figured they were much narrower than the wings, how badly would my hand shake in that short of a distance. I think they came out better than I expected. I am going to let everything dry overnight then start on the fuselage after masking the wings and stab off.

Oh, and I did take a pic of the pic in that reference I now have. As you can see, there is clear evidence of the ID band at least on the lower fuse. So, I pulled the upper fuse tape off to expose the upper part of the ID band to over spray it.

Reference Pic:


Wing Pic:
 
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