Forward with the masking tape
This bunch of hobby sessions was going to revolve heavily around masking and remasking, sometimes blasting little amounts of paint as well. In case everything went like it was supposed to, the result would be recognizeable.
My plan itself had been clear for a few years now, if you thought of the them, but when I started doublechecking sources, there was quite a bit of variance. The upside was that I could mix and match as I liked.
Masking I a
Before painting the more immediately recognized shapes I had to use an amount of masking tape. During the first evening I got the first parts of the upper wing front edges, and the nose's radar cone. The nose cone had a few different and apparently acceptable variants. With the tail wings I got the bottom edges partially masked off.
On the other side I got barely started in the first evening, mostly I outlined the area around the air intakes.
The area between the main body and the intakes was a funny thing to mask, maybe it was going to work with enough tape thrown at it...
While doing this masking I was chuckling at how slow can it be to mask straight lines? Of course in this plane the straight lines weren't quite as straight as they looked at the first glance.
Masking I b
I kept on masking the bases/roots of the tail wings. Here the gently curving shapes (and my sausage fingers) required quite a bit of poking and using smaller bits of tape to get them to conform. A cocktail stick was a fantastic tool for this stuff.
The belly side was a simple one this time, I just added the corners to the wings and lined another area under the engines. The larger areas would be covered with simpler and cheaper painter's tape.
First paint: blue
Spoiled by the subheading I loaded some blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue) in my airbrush. Before starting the paintjbo I had protected the surrounding areas with this horrendous painter's tape. I started from the nose and continued to the underbelly rectangle and finished with the tail wings.
This was a really nice shade of blue. It fit my theme perfectly.
Wing stripes I
I covered my plane like an Egyptian mummy with the crappy tape so that I got the insides of the wing decorations and the plane's sides covered from overspray. Then I applied a couple of thin white (VGA 72701 Dead White) layers but didn't panic about a supreme coverage.
Masking II - the red areas
With the paintjob drying overnight I moved the mask line to cover the blue parts. On the wings I protected narrow strips of the inner parts to keep them white. My tail wings had a few options, source pics showed either fully blue wings , or with white-red F shapes, or various red shapes.
While checking the source material, I changed my plan and fine-tuned the plane's upside: I shrank the large masked area to cover just about the rectangular areas by the air intakes. On the bottom side the area could remain. Luckily this didn't affect the already painted bits at all.
Instead of RLM red I have favoured lately I used Bloody Red (VGA 72710) that I've used on the small laser lenses. The paintable areas were moderately sized, but the evilly bad painter's tape made me waste a lot more time than necessary.
Masks off
Removing the masks was always fun and nerve-tickling, especially on these multi-stage cases. A couple of times I was about to have heart palpitations when I looked at the model and it looked like that the masks had leaked, but each time the mess was just on the lower mask layer.
The mid-result here was pretty nice. Even those double stripes that I just made up were ok, even if slightly asymmetrical.
You people could not imagine how happy seeing this made me!
There were three mild oversprays: a few puffs of paint had been gone past the left vertical stabilizer's back. Those were easily fixed. In front of the same part there was a gentle reddish smudge. And the last one was in the right wing's red-white corner, not a difficult place either. A couple of blue blasts and some grey, that would be all this required.Masking III - metal plates
Thanks to a liberal use of the crappy tape it ran out and I bought more. I used Tamiya's tape again to do the accurate work around the fixables and the engine plates, and the rest got a mass cover-up with the painter's tape. Once again the masking took three or four times as long as the painting itself :D
For the metallic parts I used good old Gunmetal (VMA 71072), while the blue and grey were the same as earlier.
On the outside the engines and their immediate surroundings were done. I now had some excess blue on the tail end's little thingies, so I had to fix them with grey. On the inside the engine nozzles were pretty much fully gunmetaled, and in a while I'd paint them with a thinned down sandy yellow or some tan. My masks weren't perfect, and it was a concious choice considering my time limits. I would fix the tiny bits by brush.
This was a thing of beauty now! To continue with the details I'd paint the landing gear and wheels by hand.
Hm. I guess I could've taken the canopy masks off now that I was done with airbrushing. My first thought was that I'd let them be until I was done with all the varnishing, but there the risk was to get the tape stuck badly under the varnish. That wasn't a cheerful thought.
The landing gear bays etc
First important detail to be added was the twin whatever hatches in the red areas of the air intakes, those I painted dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey), then I used that for the exhaust pipes in the end of the plane. With those drying I removed the masking tapes and noticed how I had missed a horizontal line altogether. D'oh!
Fixing the tiny splashes from the rear-end of the plane made it look that much cleaner. At this point I got a bit annoyed with my amateur approach to the planes, as the insides of the engines were much deeper than what I had blasted with the airbrush earlier. I just painted the insides of the nozzles, the parts you could actually see without playing with a flashlight or somesuch, with lightened up sandy colour (VMC 70874 Tan Earth, VMA 71119 White Grey).
While playing with the white grey I also painted the landing gear, the inner doors, and what you could reach in the landing gear bays. Based on the reference pics this was practically done now, I just had to add a bit of steel onto the shock absorber in the landing gears. Of course I could add some black rectangles to play the part of stickers and such, but I probably wasn't going to care to go that deep into aircraft details. Aaaah and the landing lights also needed to be painted. Maybe I'd be silly and try a greyshade jeweling effect like on the mine clearing T-34.
Ninjaedit: that trick didn't work at all with the white landing gear. I just repainted then with steel.
Wheels
Painting the wheels started on the sprues, that was supposed to ensure them not getting lost. I painted the central bits with the same off-white I used for the landing gears, and the wheels I painted with an appropriate grey (VMA 71315 Tire Black). The two-part main wheels I glued together, the nose wheel was a solo show to begin with. All three had to wait a while still to get installed.
Stuff under the wings
Nothing in the kit looked like it would work as a perfect stand-in for the null-ray, and I wasn't even daydreaming of modifying the drop tanks to look like the part. I just assembled those and painted them grey. IIRC the null rays had been at least partially blue in some pics, but I couldn't find any to prove my fake memory.
These would also get installed as the last step before doing the gloss varnish and the oil washing. Otherwise they'd only be on the way while painting.
Roundels
Five roundels needed to be, preferably looking the same, on the nose and onto the wings. There was no way I could do this freehanding, even if it would've fit the source material series and its, let's say sometimes interesting frames.
I scaled down a Decepticon logo to both 10mm and 15mm and printed them out for a stencil. It was such a tiny thing already at 15mm so I wasn't sure if the even smaller one made sense to try.
Using this cut-open printout I made a stencil out of 0,5mm styrene sheet. My idea was to make this useful for multiple markings, so at least the ones made with this stencil would look all alike. To compensate for the plastic's stiffness I was going to use this to cut the actual airbrushing mask from tape that would definitely follow the mode's shapes.
While working on it I simplified my stencil's shape when I noticed that the gaps between the face and the forehead bit were so tiny I could never cut them into this in a decent way. Not with my skills. If I wanted to play with this I could paint the separator lines by hand. The eye holes I might do with simple masking tape triangles.
Just to have an idea of how it worked I tried the styrene piece on a piece of propaganda. The result was not too good, due to variables in my test. Based on these experiences I put my tape masks on the plane, mixed a bit of blue-red (66,666...% Magic Blue; 33,333...% Bloody Red) into the airbrush and had at it.
Again the removal of the masks was hair-rising, but nothing had flowed over or under. The seat of the pants -assigned places for the roundels could've been a bit further back. They also could've been scaled to 20mm instead, except for the nose roundel. I'd follow this on the next two.
Thanks to my time limitations I didn't do the eye masks and painted the eyes by hand later. I ought to add the lines onto the foreheads, but any of the even smaller details were too small to try.
Nah. I tried one of the forehead lines but it didn't work out at all. The roundels were going to be like this now. The next Strike Eagle would get some improvements, whenever I got that far.
Heat effect
With the bigger visuals done I drybrushed the front parts of the engine plates with Steel to get them brighter than the bits by the nozzles. Going again for some kind of a heat effect I stippled Citadel's blue and then a smaller area with purple wash (Drakenhof Nightshade, Druchii Violet).
This blue result was a bit too subtle so I stippled some more when the previous layers were done. The violet was more than visible so I didn't add any more of it.
Final tweaks
This painting stage was about to be done, at long last. Before declaring it over I still painted the missing and mispainted bits of the canopy by hand. Somehow I had managed to fail with the masks somehow, but at least it was underpainted instead of leaked-through.
Now it was a good moment to attach the drop tanks under the wings. The right one snapped off later, so I had to reglue it on when I had a chance.
The wheels got installed and the unpainted rubber spots got painted. I didn't go overboard and start sanding them flat on the bottom, as that didn't add any bulging to the lower wheel sectors, and it wasn't going to be noticed on a fun model that was not intended to be taken as a 100% hardcore military model.
This was a good collection of text, wip photos and work stages into one long post. I was laughing at the idea of splitting this project into post per sesion, it would've been three months of small weekly updates. I spared you that experience this time.
