Varnishes and decals

Spot-varnishing, glossily

Following the tried and true method I went through all the areas where I intended to put decals on and covered it with safe margins with the clearcoat (Vallejo Gloss Varnish). I had chosen spots for three red stars, a unit number, and a warning stripe for the air intakes. Of course this applied both on the left and right sides of the plane.

Now the unit number that went next to the pilot's side, it could be made up to four digits, if judged merely by the horizontal space - and the decals were of a noticeable size. The decal sheet only had one small number set for a plane that also had its number in the vertical stabilizers, the hull-numbers were just about as tall as a pilot's torso. My options were limited, no matter if I chose red or blue numbers, that there only were digits 0-9 per side, meaning that the practical combinations were definitely few.

My original plan did not include the caution stripes by the air intakes, not to mention any of those dozens of tiny squares and whatnots. Still, following the traditions of the 'Mumblings, I indeed changed my mind regarding the caution stripes and actually felt that they'd bring some essential something into the model but without making me swear my lungs out while working on them. Though considering these documented decal failures, it wasn't the first time I had high hopes for these little beasts and failed just about as often.

Those foul, foul transfers

I started this fight with the red stars, because without the roundels something essential would've been missing from the plane. If those first and most important decals got ruined, I could just stop pretending with the transfers as early as possible.

To my great surprise the each of the stars fell in place beautifully and without a single complaint by me. They looked just fine and I was content. After the stars I applied the warning stripes, because they also didn't require any planning, choosing or triple-checking on positioning, just dropping in. Both of these also obeyed me, oddly enough.

After getting the more or less stock decals done I got to the individualizing part. I thought that I could go as mad as setting up a space-eating 1024, or 2028, but I realized that in addition to it taking a load of space, a three-digit number would serve just as fine. With these I meant to go for a power of two, but just when I started on 512 the five went all wet spaghetti on me - as these bastards often do, it also ruined 256 automatically. This didn't give me confidence to try 128 that would've, on failure, reduced my options pretty much down to something random. Instead I aimed for a true classic: 64.

That was otherwise a wonderful plan but the first six got spaghettified, or just plain ruined. Now it was perfectly clear that I was already passing the workable levels of annoyance and frustration with these little shits and just wanted to get it out of the way. My useful stock of numbers was rapidly dwindling, so I just took a pair of twos to represent, if nothing else, the silly fact that this was my second Russian jet.

Of course the second of the twos got a bit twisted while applying and both their positions left room for improvement, but I just could not bring myself to care anymore. Despite all my raving and ranting about how much I hate decals I still had not learned to just throw them away at first sight.

Matt varnish on top of the prints

I had built up my frustration with the decals and started undoing it by doing something pretty much foolproof: I applied Tamiya's matt varnish on all the glossy areas. Checking the next afternoon the result was decent, even if you looked at things from a certain angle the earlier glossy parts looked slightly different.

Weathering session number two

On the sunny side

I started the topside work by washing the remaining (now nicely worn-looking) metallic surfaces with brown (VMW 76513 Brown) just the same way I had treated the flipside parts. The result was again something that looked like it had seen a nice share of real life already.

The airframe I weathered just like on the bottom side, with paintbrush-applied grey (VMW 76516 Grey) all around, then wiping off the excesses off, perhaps driving some paint more into the grooves. I still approved of the result. I had been careful enough with the canopy frames and did not see any new mess ruining them.

A lot of vents

Many of my reference photos had gotten the set of vents, especially on the righthand side of the plane to jump out with their very dark look. I applied a black wash on them (VMW 76518 Black) and again wiped the excess paint away, but this time the result wasn't quite as neat, mostly thanks to the attributes of black paint.

Below the massive air intake scoops a pair of enormous vents got also washed black. Now my flying device looked pretty much aligned with many of my reference images had shown, at least on the generic level.

At this point I did a yet another check for not missing anything. Lucky for me, as I noticed the seagull impaler both on the instructions and the sprue. I glued the missing piece onto the nose cone and painted both that and a couple of fixable bits with the slightly gloomier shade of blue-grey (VMA 71319 A28M Greyish Blue).

Weathering session one

Somewhat calmer metallics

Bright as polished steel, clean engine pieces would've been at home in a model of a plane on the final stages of the assembly line. That's not what my plane was, so I drybrushed said pieces heavily with Gunmetal grey.

They looked a bit more plausible and alive, in a way, now. Of course I could've just painted them completely flat with the gunmetal, but my vision was to get a bit more lively look on the engines instead of what a plain gunmetal delivered. This was again something that just depended on your taste.

Washing

Next I washed the metallic parts with brown (VMW 76513 brown) to tone them down a bit more. I thought that the brown was a better fit to this model than the black wash I've used more often on metals.

I had somehow thought or most likely just remembered awfully wrong that my storage contained some of the Vallejo Model Wash that was meant for light vehicles, but after rummaging through my sets three times I had to admit that I really didn't have it stored anywhere.

As the next best thing I applied the grey wash (VMW 76516 for grey & dark vehicles) that I've used on a bunch of builds already. After I had applied it on I wiped the excesses off, where applicable.

Now the bottom half of the plane was practically fully painted, except for the little vents below the air intakes that I thought to wash with black, based on the reference images. A stronger effect could've been fitting but I felt that I'd at least start with a black wash.

Already my mind was working its way to get obsessed by the next stages. Of the decals I'd use the red stars and I guessed the unit number(s) too, but the insane little markings and whatnots I might not even bother to glance at. Decals have almost always just left me annoyed and offended.

Regarding the decals I remembered that in my rss feeds someone's fun scifi vehicle and how the maker had weathered the decals by gently airbrushing over them the base colour. The model in question was, if memory served, sand-coloured spinner or a fighter, so that approach wouldn't quite work in this case, thanks to the camouflage pattern. Of course I could in the final stages, before applying the matt varnish, filter the whole damn plane with a dusty colour (VMA "Dirt"). Though that approach would require another go at canopy masking...

Additional engine bit painting

A fresh layer of paint

Only when I was absolutely certain that my maskings were protecting everything as perfectly as I required, I proceeded. I airbrushed the unprotected bits with steel, just like I painted the nozzles a few posts earlier. Painting the topside pieces was easier, so it worried me considerably less than what was waiting for me on the other half of the airplane. Though, was something going to go awfully wrong on the bottom parts. repainting anything with a single colour was going to be a breeze as opposed to fixing a camouflage pattern.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrip!

As soon as I dared I ripped off the masking tape setup. The result was acceptable, I did not notice any overflow and only a couple of underpainted parts in badly visible corners. Those I could fix manually later on pretty easily.

This puzzle piece effect was curious. Maybe there was a very simple, practical reason, but the model did not betray that to me. All this bright steel was quite striking, but we weren't going to be staring at it for long, anyhow.

Back to the masking line

Step retracing

I had started drybrushing the engine nozzles with Gunmetal when something made me take another look at the reference pics I had used before. My camo pattern ran up to the attachment point of the nozzles (photo 1) when on a plane in its natural habitat the metallic area went almost as far as the leading edge of the vstabs (photo 2). Verdammt. I feared this was a deviation large enough to warrant a redo.

[SOURCE]

On the belly side the look was funnily different, with a puzzle piece look. I believed I could do that.

(c) Pavel Vanka [SOURCE]

Masking paranoia

I trusted that I'd get this done rather quickly. Now I had to make sure that all the surrounding surfaces were properly and perfectly protected before I restarted painting.

On the top I started by choosing the front edge of the paintable surface, this I did by masking horizontally along one of the panel lines. After that I fought the strips of masking tape running along the length of the plane, in a couple of pieces thanks to the gentle curvature of the engine covers. Getting these masking tape pieces tightly in place was a bit bothersome, thanks to the shape of the target edge and the confined space. For pressing the tight line I used the dull edge of the xacto knife. Doing the same between the two engines was obviously much easier with all the space I had available.

On the flipside the masking was just about the same, but as seen in the photo below, I added strips of tape directly below, along the panel lines, to implement the puzzle piece effect I mentioned earlier. Unlike in the reference image, I was not going to do the middle grey part. I just did not deem that one necessary.

Some Vympels

A missile set

My sprue contained six lumps of missile, of two variants. Four of those came with a pointy end, two of them with a blunt one, those were the only differences between them. I decided to make this missile painting subprocess a bit easier for me by painting as much of them as possible while they were still attached to the sprue.

The bits were not fully formed yet, I was to glue two large-ish canards to them still. At this point I was thinking if I should carve the rocket engine openings or not.

Primed

There wasn't much to say about the priming of these bits: I primed them white and left them to dry. My plan was to continue this way a bit further by painting them white and then cut them off for fine-tuning, fixing and detail painting.

Please refer to...

Judging by what a quick image searching brought up, I could just paint them white and either leave it at that (a very easy solution), or add some highlights. Somewhere I saw the canards done so that an opposing pair was white, the other pair black or dark grey. Or the leading edges of the canards were white while the rest was dark grey. Some wing versions weren't dark grey but more like unpainted metal, or so they looked like to me. Some, many in fact, missiles also had black bands here and there, but they looked like they'd stand out a bit too much in this scale.

These pics above made my mind: I'd use the second picture as an inspiration for the nose cones and the wings, otherwise it'd obey the first one. I started by basecoating the set of missiles with insignia white (VMA 71279).

I hoped they ended being visibly different from the primed ones

The next time I got to paint I started with the pointy four and painted their radomes with light grey (VMA 71276 USAF Light Grey), the rounder two I left as they were. Had they been camera-guided, I'd built lenses on them but enough of the photos I'd seen always showed the R-27s plain white.

Next I painted the tail wings and the canards of the full set with a metallic paint (VMC 70865 Oily Steel). This first round didn't leave them as clean as I had wanted to, partially because of the noticeable age of the paint and the thickening this had caused. Maybe I'd touch them up with some steel or chrome later on. Also the missile bodies themselves were going to need a bit of fixing with off-white, but that was going to need doing anyway after the missiles were detached.

Detached

When the paint had gotten properly dry I cut the sextet off. I cut the attachment points off from the front end and cleaned the back ends flat. Then I retired for the night, thinking what I'd do to them the next evening.

For the missiles the next step was clear: I searched for my drill and first made a hole into the bottom of one missile's rear end with one of the narrowest drill bits, thinking that I'd open it up a bit with the old xacto knife. With bits this small it was a bit too dangerous, so for the next missile I switched the widest drill bit, which was still narrower than the diameter of the missile itself. This large bit worked just fine and I used that one for all the remaining missiles.

I couldn't use the large bit to improve the first missile, for the hole I had made was too far off-centre. The same misalignment issue plagued my full missile set, but I didn't let that bother me. Now I repainted the most offensive parts of the missiles, still with the insignia white (VMA 71279), then after all did the heat-seeking missile's tips with the light grey (VMA 71276) and the insides of the rocket engine openings with just plain black (VGC 72051).

Vympel R-27R

On my palm I now had four sharp-nosed midrange air-to-air missiles with a semiactive radar homing R-27R missiles. In the real world these four-meter-long sticks, being a few centimetres narrower than a sheet of A4 paper and weighing about 250kg with an almost 40kg warhead. Their velocity was a respectable (according to Wikipedia, unconfirmed) 4.5 Mach.

Vympel R-27T

The final two missiles were model R-27T, meaning they sported an infrared homing module and they were recognizeable by their round nose cones. These missiles had only half of the range, 40km, compared to their radar-seeking counterparts, but the rest of the specs were naturally the same as the only difference between the R and T variants was this sole module.

The layout

Just for the fun of it I laid out the missiles' layout under the plane. I thought that the R-sticks were going to be loaded near the centre of the plane, next to the engines and the T versions a bit further from the engines, below the wings. Not that I thought that made any actual difference for real.

Removing the bandages

My paintjob got an overnight curing again before I tore off the masking tapes. I was surprisingly confident that everything had gone well and that the tapes would not be taking half the paint with them. It was a bit unusual.

While I was removing the other tape bits I also poked the edges of the canopy masks with the tip of the xacto knife, then took them off by hand. None of those had leaked anywhere. Not a single piece of masking tape had gotten too stuck onto the painted surfaces. This was a really successful moment in the project!

Only now I reglued the missing engine exhaust nozzle back, because now it wasn't going to make me work more with the maskings. That was as far as the rest of the plane was concerned, as the nozzles still needed some looking at.

As if completed

Right now my Flanker was, in principle at least, completed. Of course it was missing its teeth, the weathering and the markings. But as a plane it was done.

I found it really good looking already. Adding the sixpack of missiles was going to affect the look in its own way. *cough* of course I managed to knock a sensor thingy off of the right side of the plane, because why couldn't things just go smoothly from start to finish?

Like clumps of slush in the winterlessness

White on grey

My detailings were going to be very simple and done quickly. I painted all the targets with the gently off-white (VMA 71279 Insignia White), because it felt nicer than pure white itself. The nose cone I painted by blasting away from the airframe. Maybe I should've thought of protecting my camo paintjob by adding a second lenght of masking tape, as one could never be too careful with the overspray.

The cover of the aerial refueling system I painted from pretty close up, with small circular movements. Maybe I managed to avoid puddling this time too. Again I should've spent a tiny bit more time and materials on the covering things, just in case.

Can you imagine that had this been a tank I was painting, I wouldn't have considered doing any masking this lazily and hazardously? I just realized this silly detail while writing this post, a detail that may have been painfully obvious to the rest of you for years.

The tips of the vertical stabilizers I painted, like I planned the last time, with a piece of paper held behind the target area. It worked pretty nicely.

Detailing preparation

Tape!

After the camo was done the airbrushings for this project were pretty much completed already. I wanted to highlight a few parts, using the previous post's reference image as inspiration. Quite a few pics I had encountered the tail wings had either on the inner or outer side a longish light grey or so rectangle running along the leading edge. Based on a feeling I decided not to do any of that on my plane.

Three (or four if we wanted to do some semantic nitpicking) things remained in my plan. The nose cone that covered the front-facing radar, next to which I could've also painted a darker rectangle up until the canopy front, but I didn't really like the way it looked in my mind's eye so I opted out of that too.

Both the tail wing top tips I decided to pain, both from inside and outside. Some variance existed in the photos I had seen, many with only one of those - maybe that depended somehow on the rectangles I chose to omit mere moments earlier.

The most curious bit I encountered was the refueling slot, that I can't recall touching in any other but the N/AW A-10 project a few years (5) ago. On an impulse I decided to implement that little bit on the Flanker.

Nosy

Masking off the nose cone I did with about half a dozen strips of masking tape. This did not provide me with a perfectly round edge, but it was just good in my opinion.

VStabs

The edges on top of the vertical stabilizers I simply cut off with pieces of masking tape. I recognized the need to dynamically protect the rest of the plane from the overflow already at this point. Most likely I'd just hold a sticky note behind the target chunk while spraying.

Aerial refueling thing

The fuel door was traditionally weirdly shaped. I protected its four main edges first and then added little details to the shape with another four diagonally aligned pieces. I didn't try to follow the shape perfectly, because with my skills I'd needed to do that with the x-acto knife just like with the canopy frames. The issue was that I simply didn't dare to risk ruining my precious paintjob with an evilly sharp knife!