Painting I

Hiding the glass

I started working on the glass pane by first painting the frames with black-grey on the inside and while on it, painted the cockpit's insides with the same paint. As soon as the canopy piece had dried, I covereed it with three strips of masking tape and cut the excesses off (at this point it was very useful to see the grey-black through the tape, as it made cutting so much easier).

After a moment of letting the paint dry I grabbed a sepia-coloured Citadel paint (Citadel Shade: Seraphim Sepia) and applied it on the inner surface. My plan was to get a nice shade on it, not golden like some planes seem to have, but something similar-ish. The liquid just didn't seem to catch on, so I didn't spend too much time with it and just white glued the canopy on the plane (knowing that if I had to adjust something, it'd be quick and easy to crack the canopy off again). Before I did it I even remembered to glue the targeting glass pane on the dashboard.

Grey as a base

I thought that the best approach would be to paint the whole plane with one tone and then finetune everything else. So I airbrushed both sides with grey (VMA 71120 USAF Medium Grey). After that had dried, I took out the masking tape and began working on a maybe slightly tolerable paint pattern that I had seen. There the wing's edges were lighter and had sharp edges. As did the nose cone, with a sharp salmiac pattern. Then on the top of the plane there'd be a fuzzy darker shape.

The source is forgotten

Of course I took some artistic liberties and left the rear wings out of this and I didn't mask all of the rear edges of the wings, either. I took an approach with noticeable "leading edges" instead, because to my eyes it kinda looked like a better-looking way of doing this. To me the wide band going around the plane looked a bit too cartoony.

Thanks to the angle of the horizontal stabilizers, masking them was surprisingly challenging. The nose cone also took a bit of time because of the zig-zagging salmiac shapes, but it was at least very easy to do. In short: I only protected the edges of the plane so that I could very quickly and easily airbrush the light grey (VMA 71121 USAF Light Grey) from well-chosen angles. While I was painting the horizontal stabilizers I used post-it notes as additional dynamic protectors so that there was no overspray. To protect the underside of the plane from the potential overspray I applied a few long strips of masking tape, just in case. [150]

The form-breaker

As soon as I had the light greys painted I loaded my airbrush with dark grey (VMA 71123 USAF Dark Grey) and shot a random shape on top of my model.

With maskings on place...

...and without

Oh yes. The canopy looked like the pilot had vomited prodigiously inside the plane. What in the Empire could I do to fix that now? I really couldn't see a good way out. [160]