On my last Dora build, I put a base coat of uniform brown on the prop blades under the RLM 70 Dark Green. On this one, I'm going to go one little step further and put some wood grain on the props. Chipping will be relatively light so you probably won't be able to make out any of the grain but hey, what's a little over-obsessiveness among modeling friends?
The props were sprayed with a yellow earth color. I used my cheapo children's oil paints to simulate the wood grain.
It took me a couple of tries before I got something that could pass for wood grain. Honestly, not very convincing in my opinion and I would work harder if this wood pattern were any more visible but in the context of serving as a chipping base, I'm going to move on. Oil paints dry slow so I'm going to give these at least a couple of days to dry and then I'll seal it with a clear coat before putting a strip of metal color along the leading edge.
I wanted to give the red and white underside pattern a try so I used the landing gear covers as a test mule. For this test, I'm using my normal mottle pre-shading routine.
Tamiya X-1 White goes over the pre-shade.
Tamiya X-7 Red goes over the white.
It's workable but I'm not 100% happy with the tone of the red. It's a little bit too orangeish. I'll have to play around with base color or maybe try to find another shade of red to use.