To the grassy airfields, march!

A stroke of genius

I got a mad idea: let's build a base for this plane, too. Change is refreshing, they say, so I wanted to do something different from the previous two (which also had been not too alike). During the second world war grass airfields were in use, so that's what I was going to do!

Mozart, help me!

There was a box of Mozardkugeln that we had bought from TXL and the lid was just about the right size in my mind. I tried the Focke on the lid and it sat there nicely, with no room to spare.

I thought that it might be beneficial to roughen the smooth plastic surface a bit to get the paint and glue stick better. So I took out a bit of fine sandpaper and did some crisscross sanding both on the top and the sides. All the sides I painted with Vallejo's Chocolate Brown (VMC 70872 Chocolate Brown) and left them there.

Glue and railroad decorations

After the paint had dried I dropped a good dollop of white glue on the lid and spread it around to cover most of the surface while avoiding getting the layer too thick. I gave the edges a bit of a clear buffer space just in case.

I started applying the greenery where the model itself would block the base and I tried to leave a bit of clear space where the wheels were going to end up. Then I pressed the plane on its place and kept dumping stuff on the remaining base. Mostly I used some green fluff  (Woodland Scenics: Coarse Turf, Medium Green), but I also tore up a few larger bits of the yellower green (Woodland Scenics: Foliage, Light Green) carpet-like stuff. In a few random places I dropped tussocks[?] (Noch: Grasbüschel Sommer; Noch: Grasbüschel Herbst) just to provide some variety.

When I was just about content with the result and coverage, I detached the plane and pressed its wheels in a straight line backwards from its standing place. My goal was to get slight but hopefully noticeable ruts. This way the plane shouldn't look like it had just fallen from the sky (see my nitpickings in April regarding the AT-ST in the wintery scene).

Yeah, I had applied the decorations quite heavy-handedly so that I wouldn't even accidentally end up with bald spots on my base. I left the setup to cure for about a day before I gently shook off the excess material.

projectmumblings.queue.append(project1, project2)

New foldables

I decided to skip the excess ramblings this time, so the short version's this: I got a couple of new project entities introduced into my work queue. Both were Metal Earth Models sets, one of them was to enlargen my Imperial collection with an AT-ST scout walker and the other one was very familiar from my childhood: the awesome leader of the Decepticons - Megatron!

Apparently the ME's line had been extended with new stuff since I last checked. According to the back of the packet there were three other kits: Slave I, Incom T-47 and a beautiful Lambda-class shuttle. I have no doubts that we'll see a couple of these at some point in the future.

I immediately had a feeling that Megatron would be pretty quickly in progress and in the 'Mumblings as soon as there was space. One of the first thoughts was "I've got to bring this to the office".

Of course the Transformers title theme started playing in my poor head immediately, accompanied with several quotes spoken by Frank Welker. And that was all very good indeed.

Non-round roundels and whatnot

Pure madness

"Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results"
-someone somewhere, at some point in history

Despite my very bad feelings from the Warthog project's decals I decided to give those bastards another shot. At least the decals in this kit looked fresh, so maybe they'd behave. Thanks to the Strafgesetzbuch 86a the decal sheet didn't contain the swastikas for the tail. So I had to either skip them or paint them myself. I thought that skipping them would've been comical, as they were used everywhere, historically. But then again, I'm not German.

Painting some forbidden signs

I tried a new approach with this pretty simple shape. First I cut two square-shaped pieces of masking tape and put them on the tail so that they stood on their edges.

Then I laid a few thin strips of tape along the edges of the square. My fingers were a bit too large and cumbersome near the tightest of corners, but I got the basics covered and that was what mattered.

After these the middle bit was unnecessary, as it was only there to provide location data for the edges. Luckily I didn't scrape off any paint while peeling the tape bits off...

My last step consisted of painting a black X in the center. The problem was that I couldn't be perfectly consistent with my line widths. I also didn't want to use any extra masks for the angled bits and then just airbrush the whole thing. I had tried that and it caused more fixables than what it was worth.

After the crosses were done I painted the angled bits and tore off the tapes. I had to fix a couple of dots but that was it. Then I googled furiously to see how the tail swastikas were on real planes and apparently not nearly all of them had the white edges, depending on the camo pattern and whatnot. So I decided that I wouldn't ruin my model any more and let it be.

Glossy phase

I had to remember to apply the varnish over the drop tank as well, as that was going to get a couple of decals. This time I didn't waste time and material by varnishing things that weren't going to get decals. That also provided me some patches to hold on to so I could go over the whole model on one go.

The decal hell

Right now I still had the chance to make my life much easier and happier by throwing the decals into the garbage bin. In a moment of temporary insanity I decided to stay away from my comfort zone and I stuck to my earlier decision of using these cursed decals.

I don't know where I'm goin'
But I sure know where I've been
Hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday
An' I've made up my mind,  I ain't wasting no more time
Here I go again, here I go again

Session I

As usual, I started my decal-laying with the most important ones and the generally larger ones. First I put on the wingtop Balkenkreuz profiles. They behaved nicely. Then I put on the wing-bottom full Balkenkreuz. Then the ones on the sides. All these last ones had something funny, as if they weren't completely straight and even. Later I saw it clearly in the photos: one of the black bars was off by one pixel and therefore looked odd.

I proceeded to apply the minuses on the sides, the JG1 insignia on the nose (that was barely understandable in this scale, with my eyes at least), the red "23" in front of the Balkenkreuz. Wikipedia told me that the box art boy, Heinz Bär maybe flew the red 23 when he achieved his 200th victory, but the plane was an A7 while the kit has always been talking about an A8 model. Not that I cared, but I guess someone could get a nervous breakdown with this.

After all the easy ones were done, I tried to use the "don't walk here" dashed lines on the wings, but the second one went all spaghetti on me and I threw them all away. Frustrating. I did remember to use all the markings on the drop tank and those settled on pretty nicely too. Then I went on adding some random little markings that I could while my one-hour playtime allowed. At this point I was going pretty much in the number order, after I had used the octane markers and all those decals that weren't representing minuscule text.

At this point I was amazingly content with these decals. Maybe it wasn't as bad an idea as I had feared. The remaining decals (the ones that would go on the red bits took 10 equally unreadable smudges alone) I'd do the next time - or over the next few times if I got too annoyed with the tiny decals. Or if they just happened to take way too long, being tiny and all.

Those Balkenkreuz that I had been wondering about while working proved to be a bit more weird in the photos: if not all of them, three out of four had white shining in the end of one of the black bars. They were printed or designed off by one pixel. I guess I should've looked at them more carefully, but then again, had I sliced a bit off, I think I would've done too much damage. I guess I'd come up with something.

Session II

I went through the rest of the decals in an orderly fashion. Both the "Nur hier betreten" texts tried to take the spaghetti route but I managed to salvage them and set them straight. Sadly the edge lines didn't behave. After all the others I did the decals on the red pieces on the control surfaces. While looking at the first one I thought that I could've done the same, just much faster and much less annoyingly with a bit of white paint instead. All ten settled on beautifully, which was nice. I also glued the extra fuel tank under the belly of the plane, so this model was just about done now.

Matt phase

Before I applied the matt varnish I attacked the largest decals gently with a fine sandpaper. Those markings were just too bright, stood out too much in my opinion. I just wanted to get a bit of wear on them. Of course, had I some other kind of a paintjob underneath, I could've airbrushed over them lightly with the underlying tone to get them mixed in a bit better, but with this job it just wasn't doable.

In case I had used way too thick layers of matt varnish the last time, I tried to take it more easily now. It was also very likely that I didn't get a perfect coverage now, so I was mentally preparing for a later touching up session.

That was it. Now the plane itself was finished, completed, but I could try to come up with something interesting still...

A new camo pattern

Mapping my needs, again

I was looking at the paintjobs suggested in the instruction sheet and I compared the RLM colours it used to my own collection. There was not a single shade that I owned yet, and I thought I did have a couple at least. I asked google for a list of VMA paints and RLM paints and how they compare, then wrote down a few codes.

Vallejo does offer a handy sixteen-bottle set of RLM paints (but I didn't think that Hobby Point had those in their shelves), and I didn't think I was ever going to be that kind of a Luftwaffe-modeler, anyway... Though I have to admit that a number of Luftwaffe '46 Wunderwaffe units have always intrigued me in some way ;) Or maybe I should say that the Wunderwaffe have been close to my heart, regardless of which branch of Wehrmacht they belonged to or whatever their what if percentage was.

Heading home by the shop

One day I just left the office with a bit greater rush than usual and popped by my royal supplier. Sadly they had run out of black-green, so I took the next one (VMA german green). I decided that it was close enough.

Off to paint

Before I started, I checked out the instruction sheet and its markings. To save my nerves (and time) I wrote in the instructions next to the silly codes (a black triangle with a number 11 inside, for example) a plaintext comment on what I was going to use, such as lgrey or gviolet. Maybe I would've remembered what I wanted and where, but as I knew how hollow my head is, I thought that playing it safe wasn't going to be harmful.

Priming white

For a change I decided to prime the model white. That Vallejo's Grey Surface Primer I've been using has been a bit weird lately. Afterwards I realized that I had forgotten to prime the drop tank. This happens quite a lot.

The pattern

For my plans I decided that the two patterns in the instructions could be mostly used as a source of inspiration. I started the painting phase by painting the bottom. Both the bottom areas and the lower sides I painted grey (VMA 71406 Pale Blue Grey ~= RLM 76), as well as the tail wing. This time I remembered to shoot the wings from straight ahead, behind and from the sides. This time the wing edges shouldn't end up having some silly imperfectly covered parts.

A bit later I flipped the model around and painted just about everything from the top with the darker grey (VMA 71054 Dark Grey Blue ~= RLM 74). Over that I airbrushed a hopefully form-breaking pattern with grey violet (VMA 71128 Grey Violet ~= RLM 75). I hoped it'd look like something tolerable when it was dry. In general I would've liked a tightly edged splinter pattern much more than this dynamic freehand pattern. But that's just me and my taste and preference.

Looking at the photos it looked like the lower sides would need a bit of touching up with the lighter grey, now I oversprayed especially while doing the tail parts. Otherwise it did look ok to me. Of course it was still missing the mottling and I had a couple of approaches in my mind for that. I guess I'd redo the trick I had read about once, where you'd spray through holes in a piece of cardstock, for example. This way the dots would be soft-edged. Another option was to abuse an old toothbrush, but I didn't think I was going for that.

Round 2

The next time I masked the surroundings of the landing gear wells and painted the insides with a lightish green (VMA 71044 Light Grey Green ~= RLM 02). After that I airbrushed the spinner-propeller setup with dark green (VMA 71020 German Green (close enough to RLM 70)).

Only after those steps I started fixing the issues of the first round of camo painting. I redid the lower sides with the lighter grey mentioned before, now using a piece of cardstock to help with the horizon line. This way I got a clear but not too sharp-edged line. The method for mottling I had thought of didn't really work out, thanks to my badly thought out mask setup.

Now that the rear was good enough for me, I could finally mask the area for the red band. In the same session I also masked off the lips in the ailerons and tailerons, then airbrushed them all with red (VMA 71085 Ferrari Red).

Of course I realized it while I was already painting, that I had, after all, forgotten the tail wing's mask. I'd have to do that manually when I was in the paintbrush phase of the project, like working on the metallic pieces and such.

Touching up

Had the A-subtype Butcher Bird the easily noticeable Messerschmitt- or D-model -like exhaust pipe ends, I'd painted them black at this point and left them with a semiglossy varnish to pretend I had a seminew engine in my hands. In this scale you couldn't see the exhaust pipes that were behind the gills, so I didn't even think of microadjusting them at all. Their existence could be told from the weathering, if at all.

The armament

Supported by common sense and a gentle "I'll double check this just in case" googling I painted the visible parts of the cannons in the wings with Gun Metal Grey (VMC 70863), as well as the visible parts of the machine guns in the nose. I did consider drilling or carving up the barrel tips just a bit, but I didn't think they'd survive it, so I let them be. Instead I dabbed a tiny drop of black on each barrel. Especially the result on the MG 17 machine guns was amazing, even if I said so myself.

The wheels and the landing gear

As almost always, I painted the rubber parts of the wheels with black grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey). I had also reversed my decision of using the green replacement paint I had picked up for the propeller blades, so I repainted that part again with black grey as well. That felt like a better replacement for black green than german green.

The hubs of the main wheels and the top of the spinner I painted black (VMA 71057 Black), even though the instructions suggested painting the hubs white. The tail wheel's hub I left as it was, light grey. Both the shock absorbers on the landing gear struts I painted metallic (VMC 70865 Oily Steel), as required.

That pylon and the tip of the downwards-pointing stick I painted with oily steel as well. The hanger itself I painted with gunmetal, just like the gun parts. I guess I could've used the same shade on all but I felt like using a couple of different shades just to make things look a bit different from each other.

Miniweathering

As I was now done with the big issues, I decided to spend a few minutes with some gentle weathering. I wasn't going to do anything grand or complicated. I drybrushed some black to the grooves in front of the nose's machine guns. Then I drybrushed some kind of a "this sounds good"-kind of a dark smudge on the sides from the gills backwards, for exhaust stains.

Then I drybrushed some gunmetal grey here and there on the wings and the sides of the plane. Mostly I touched up on the panel edges, bumps and especially the areas on the wing's bases where people'd walk the most. I tried to keep the effect decently light.

After these tiny but important steps I finally remembered to glue on the propeller part to the airframe. The piece holding the propeller's shaft didn't quite fit into the hole in the nose, so I had to carve it a bit to get things to attach properly.

Washing up

All the light grey surfaces I washed with Vallejo's wash (VMW for grey & dark vehicles), the green landing gear wells I washed with the green one (VMW for green vehicles), just as the camouflaged bits. I decided they were more green than grey.

All the metallic bits got their own treatment. I just applied a bit of my ancient Citadel's brown (Devlan Mud that I think I should throw away). Perhaps I could've skipped this phase, but now it's done. If I get second thoughts it'd be quick to repaint them, there weren't that many metallic parts.

Open sesame

Again with great expectations (and fears) I took off the masking tape pieces from the canopy windows. Looking way too close it didn't look too great, but it worked from a short distance already.