After some more minor puttying and sanding, I decided to put on the canopy. Due to the shim that was placed between fuselage halves in front of the windscreen, a bit of putty work was needed at the base of the windscreen.
I am going to do some light chipping on the fuselage sides and wing roots so in preparation of the base metal, I laid down some gloss black in the appropriate areas.
I used Alclad White Aluminum as the metal finish. This particular shade of Alclad gives me the most trouble, often clogging the tip of my airbrush which requires constant cleaning during the shoot. I got terrible results at the wing root for some reason. My guess is that the stuff dries so fast (hence the constant tip clogs) that shooting a further distance from the surface results in this grainy finish?
Yuck... that's not going to work! I have two choices at this point... sand that finish down or try to wipe it clean with iso alcohol. I went with the former, which may not have been the best choice given that I had THREE coats (gray primer, black and Alclad) to deal with. Make sure you wear rubber gloves when doing this type of cleanup because you are bound to end up with fingerprints if you don't.
After the base metal finish is complete, it's given a liberal coat of hairspray that's allowed to dry. Preshading is next.
The bottom of this Typhoon calls for Azure Blue. I mixed this shade using an approximate 50/50 mix of Tamiya X-14 Sky Blue and XF-61 Light Blue. I used 40/60 mix to accentuate the control surfaces and the middle of various panels to give the finish a bit of texture. which turned out to be a very subtle effect... hardly noticeable.
I'll let this dry and tackle the top colors next.