???...I was expecting something special tonight...
So how was it then?
Lots to tell here. With this model, I decided to jump into trying out Tamiya paints as so far I have not been 100% satisfied with any product I have tried. My Pollyscale paints totally suck in the airbrush. Model Masters are good but I've found the bottle design to be poor in that the paper "seal" in the lid disintegrates after a while and the paint dries out. At the local model show in June, Spencer Pollard was doing a demo of paint techniques using Tamiya colours and I was impressed with their performance. Notwithstanding Tamiya's annoying habit of not producing premixed standard colours, I decided to give them a try.
Well, first off, I quickly discovered that mixing the assigned colours per the Tamiya instruction sheet is a mistake as the colours come out way off. The below pic shows my adjusted mix to get the Dark Earth right after having started with the Tamiya recommendation of a 1:1 mix of XF52 and XF64. The red tint of the 64 throws the colour way off and I had to add some yellow and white to get this result. Even so, it's still a bit too much on the red side for my liking.
It was at this point that I was also beginning to doubt the health of my airbrush as, despite meticulous cleaning of the parts, I was getting more splatter at the edges than I was accustomed to and I have a feeling that there's a slight bend in the needle. So I decided to try the technique of using Blu-Tac to get a soft edge of the camo demarcation. Below is a pic of the masking that I did.
And then, it was a matter of mixing up colours for the Dark Green which Tamiya recommend to be 1 part XF58 to 5 parts XF62. WRONG! Way too dark and too brown. So I lightened this with lots more XF 58 and some white and, after I thought that it looked good in the cup, squirted this mix on. Below is the result with the mask removed.
Well, I tell you, I'm impressed with how this stuff goes on but the Dark Green is still too dark in my opinion. However, I intend to give this model a pretty sun-bleached and dusty look so this darkness will be toned down. However, the Blu-Tac mask result was not what I wanted either. Here's a close-up of what it looks like and to me the soft edges vary too much and in some cases were too hard.
So I tried thinning down the left-over green and free handing an edge and here's what I got (see the edge on the green patch at top right). The apparent damage to the needle on my airbrush is causing too much of of a splatter so I'm going to do 2 things. First is to get a new needle. Second is that tomorrow, I will try to create a soft edge freehand by going back to my premixed brown and spraying as sharp and edge as I can using my trusty Paasche VL.
Overall, the results are a bit disappointing. My love/hate relationship with Tamiya continues but I'm confident that I'll get this model looking OK in the end. Stay tuned. And thanks again for your continued interest.