Working on the details

Sigh

Before I painted the business end of the GAU-8 Avenger, as a spur of the moment kind of thing, I masked the refueling door for painting. Within the same minute I painted (VMA 71065 Steel) the gun's barrrels and the plate with a couple of puffs from the airbrush. Later on when I was taking the masking tapes off, I got to notice to my great happiness that a tiny strip of paint had come off. That I fixed manually right away.

Those small but important problematic things

If there was something to remember in addition to these parts in the nose, it was the main landing gear wheels. Usually I paint wheels with grey-black, but because the whole plane is painted quite dark, there wouldn't have been enough contrast. To ensure one could actually notice the wheels, I painted them flat black (VMC 72051). The barely visible wheel hubs I wasn't really sure about: should they remain the same colour as the plane or would they be lighter, like they usually seem to be? Somehow having them all the same colour would only make sense but I thought I'd take a look at the references just in case. In the end I kept them the way they were for that uniform look.

In case I was going to apply a wash I had left the canopy masking on. Just in case, you know, as it'd suck to find out I had ruined the canopy in the last stages of the project and only because of my own idiocy.

Engines

How to detail the engines was also a bit of a headscratcher for me. I thought I'd first do the blades black and then drybrush them lightly with a metallic paint, then dirtify the rear end with something dark. Maybe I'd paint the insidest of the smallest center tubes black. I guess it'd do something, even if they'd be in shadows all the time.