Strike Eagle's weathering

The weathering operation

Differing from the last post I expected this to be quite a bit shorter and calmer, as my plan was just to play with the oil paints a bit and maybe drybrush the autocannon port's surroundings a bit. It wouldn't be the only time my plans changed with the progress of the process.

Gloss varnish as a base

To protect my maintjob I brushed Vallejo's gloss varnish all over it. As the photo showed the rightmost drop tank still wasn't where it belonged. No rush, as long as I did it before going for the oils.

And yes, I did brush-apply the gloss coat, I just didn't feel like setting up the airbrushing stuff that evening and play with the canopy re-masking just to make this a tiny bit quicker. The smart approach would've been taking the canopy apart for a separate treatment and protect the cockpit on its own.

Now it would be the time for weathering and that was always lots of fun. I was so excited about the paint scheme already, I could not wait to get it to catch the eyes even better.

Sepia mess

I applied my wash pretty harshly all over the model, I clearly didn't concentrate on the gaps and grooves only. With this I wanted to get more variety on the hull in addition to the panels popping better.

Cleanup

After a bit of drying time I cleaned up most of the mess away with thinner. Doing this reminded me vividly why I wasn't a huge fan of airplanes in general: the left drop tank and half of a landing gear came off.

More oils

Sepia being out of the way I thought I could try different tricks on the upper and lower halves of the plane. On the top side I added little dots of grey, yellow and buff, and then I blended them along the length of the plane. This may have been the second or third time I tried out the dot filtering, this time I may have been a bit too cautious with the colours I chose.

On the opposite side I went mostly for blending Industrial Oil stains starting from the rear edges of the three landing gear bays. Who knew where this individual had been flying.

At this point I was about to take the model to the sauna to dry overnight, when I left my gear into a wrong place for  amoment, while I was standing next o them. Of course I was slower than a jumping cat, and the plane fell on its wheels on the ground. The victims were the other main landing gear and the nose wheel, both of which I started fixing the next evening.

The full bracket-shaped thing had broken off (and gotten lost) of the nose wheel, so I just swore and glued the wheel straight into the remains. This then affected the plane's posture and it looked like it was braking strongly after landing.

A satin varnish

I think I spent a silly amount of time pondering whether to use satin varnish as the finish or matt varnish. After the ponderings I chose Vallejo's Satin Varnish but knew I could change my mind if the reflections were too much after a day or two.

In the end the satin varnish was a bit too strong for my eyes. I then covered the plane with AK Interactive's super matt varnish.

 

Now I had just the landing lights to be fixed, or what remained after the cat helped a bit. The light was visible in the photo right above, but it had gotten more weathered than I required.

When the super matt varnish had cured I drybrushed black on the Vulcan's opening and did that for the grilles behind the cockpit too. Just to get them to stand out a tiny bit more.

This meant that the first of my three F-15s was done, except for the photo shoot.