This is the Airfix 1/48 Spitfire Vb, I put this one up for a while well I sorted out my paint issues. After a bit of reading around I've finally decided to give Hataka Lacquers a go and so far not to bad, I much prefer the Ocean grey to Tamia's or Vallejo's offerings as it's not so blueish. I also downloaded a
Masking Template for the Spitfire created by a
Mr. John Eaton . This is apparently meant for the Tamiya kit, for the most part it fit ok, I had to resize on my printer to 95% , but no matter haw hard I tried I couldn't get the nose mask to fit so I ended up piecing together one from the 3 view.
For the most part I'm not unhappy with how it turned out for a first try using this kind of masking technique, but there is a bit of room for improvement so I decided to go with the D Day option on the decal sheet I bought for it to help hide a few ills......
The Hataka paints were pretty good at sticking to the model for the most part except for one area ,I sometimes use a cheap hardware masking tape instead of my Tamiya tape and this is what did it, but easily patched up. This is my second attempt at using my technique of masking invasion stripes where I mask and spray the basic pattern and then after brush paint over that to have it appear a bit more sloppy and brush painted. This way it avoids a gooey build up of thick paint and still looks realistic to me, maybe a bit overly sloppy in this case but with a few more applications I think I'll get a bit more refined in my approach
The brush strokes are not that obvious under the gloss coat at the moment but I think once this area is matted they will be a little more noticeable.
Decals in progress, only managed to mess up 2 1/2 so far....