**** DONE: GB-41 1/48 Hawker Hurricane Mk XII - PTO from 1937

Excellent paintwork

Thanks Greg.

Gloss coat is on and curing. Spent some time on the 'puter yesterday and cut my masks for the markings. I'll post pics when I get around to painting them.

Happy to say that my home made masks turned out a great result. The masks were made on vinyl transparent peel-off sheets using a Cricut digital cutter with the insignia files cut and pasted from my pdf drawing and sized on the proprietary software for the cutter. Following is the sequence of application. I started with the underside so that I could try out the technique and colours first.

The full disc of the mask was first carefully placed on the model and the area surrounding the roundel was further covered with paper to prevent overspray.



The first challenge was in trying to get the mask to conform to the surface around the aileron actuator bulge. The vinyl is quite stiff and kept lifting up when I pressed down to make it conform so I ended up cutting slits in the mask. I then sprayed a layer of white.



Tamiya paints dry almost immediately so there's no need to wait before applying further masks over freshly painted surfaces. Once the white was done, I placed all of the mask rings within the painted disc, making sure to line everything up perfectly so that there were no gaps or overlaps:



The mask portion covering the blue ring was then removed and the blue applied. For this I used Tamiya XF-8 Flat Blue with a tiny drop of XF-2 Flat Black



Seeing that I could control the spray fairly tightly, I didn't bother putting the blue mask back on and went straight to the center red dot. After removing the mask, I sprayed Tamiya XF-7 Flat Red with a touch of black. All paints were thinned to a ratio of about 40 paint to 60 thinner.



To my surprise, the reveal showed absolutely no sign of bleeding so no touch ups were needed.



Here's the underside with both roundels done. My only issue is that I think that I added too much black the red and blue so the colours don't quite represent the "bright" insignia colours. I'll adjust this for the upper surfaces.



Thanks for looking in everyone.

Great work so far Andy!

Colours look fine on my laptop but then I'm not used to seeing the brighter insignia. One thing that prevents me from spraying insignia is properly lining it up; you nailed it

Excellent !

Thanks guys. I continued with the masking yesterday and today. After the bottom surface roundels were done, I turned to the more complicated fuselage sides. I say complicated for two reasons: first, the roundels are much smaller (just under 3/4" in diameter) and come in 4 rings rather than 3 and second, the ribbing contours combined with the stiff vinyl would make for poor adhesion. Facing this, I set about painting the port side, doing the roundel and fin flash at the same time. The result, after removing the masks, was that there was indeed some bleeding under the masks this time. The below pic was taken immediately after peeling the masks and shows bleeding of the red into the white on both the roundel and the fin flash as well as some slight misting of the white and yellow under the mask at the bottom of the roundel. Also, while the yellow looked the right tone in the bottle, viewing the sprayed-out colour reveals that it's a bit to "canary" for me and should maybe have been given a tiny drop of red.



With those learnings, I went ahead and masked the fin flash and roundels on the starboard side and also did the wing uppers at the same time. With a little more care taken, this time the results were much better and no touch up was needed. With that done, I moved on to the letters. Below you can see the mask for the starboard M in place as well as the one for the port side, ready for paint.



The result, after spraying Tamiya XF-83 Medium Sea Grey can be seen below. Note the small amount of paint lift at 7 o'clock on the roundel. The scratch on the wing is the result of me accidentally dropping a scalpel there - not good for any paint finish!



The starboard wing experienced the worst paint lift after removing the masks. My first reaction was to leave it; I had sprayed some left over silver over some of the surfaces in anticipation of possibly using the hairspray technique to create some paint chips and then decided against it because I wanted to keep the wear a bit more restrained. The lifted areas below were just too much for my liking so I ended up spraying them over again. I think the aluminum paint actually made for too smooth an undercoat to resist the masks and so contributed to the paint lift.



With the touch-ups complete and another coat of gloss clear applied, here's how she looks now:



Next up will be making and applying decals for the stencils and serial number. Thanks again for the comments and for following.

Looking the dog's dangly bits !

Well done

Thanks gents. One thing I will do next time I paint my own markings is to make sure that no white makes it to the outer edge of the mask cut. Though the white is useful to provide a good base for subsequent colours, a faint bit of white can be seen at the edge of the blue roundel edges. Perhaps an initial spray of blue on the mask edge will avoid this in future. That said, I'm quite happy with how things turned out.

Wow....what Terry said...

It's an excellent explanation Andy, the pictures are very clear.
The details to be corrected are minimal and I do not see any major problem with the colors either.
Congratulations Andy and thank you for sharing your step by step. It is very useful.

Saludos

Appreciate the feedback guys, thanks.

Home made decals printed and clear coated. Thankfully, the RCAF Hurricanes serving domestically had very few stencils!

Thanks Wojtek.

Had to adjust the camo lines a bit at the starboard serial number location to match the historical record!





Re-glossed now and curing before the decal application. Note that I have also painted the anti-skid surface on the wing walk area.

Great work so far Andy!

Damn nice Andy.