Model in a Month - Sptifre Progress

Been making steady and good progress on the Spitfire. Not sweating every single detail or flaw is proving quite refreshing.

I really like Mr Color (as opposed to Mr Hobby, although they are good as well) acrylic lacquer paints. They give a excellent hard finish with just a few thin coats, great when you don't want to drown fine detail. The downside is they can be tricky to get thinned enough to get through the airbrush, but not to thin.

I had picked up one their RAF Colour Sets, (No 2 ) a few months back so figured this was good project to try them on . I'm no RAF Colour Expert but I'm happy with the shades in the bottle. They are pretty close to the new Tamiya RAF colours with the exception of the Ocean Grey. The Tamiya Ocean Grey is much bluer than the Gunze one.

I didn't bother with pre shading anything, I just painted the underside with Medium Grey, then masked it up. Then I painted the Ocean Grey upper.

The Red Roo instructions, Tamiya instructions and my other reference material didn't quite match as to the pattern of the Camouflage. Rembering my brief, not to get anal, I decided to go with the Tamiya instructions even though I'm sure this scheme wasn't quite right for this aircraft.

The beauty of this approach is that I could cut the shapes out from the instructions and use them as masks. The masks were held of the kit with white tac blobs

In a few places I used white tac sausages, rather than mask. I've always had issues with blu tac leaving a oily film on the paint work. I'm not sure why or what causes it , perhaps its the oils from my hands or it's just the blu tac itself. Anyway I ordered some white tac from the UK as I've heard this doesn't suffer the oily film issue...

Well it did, but just little, not everywhere like the blu tac does.

Prior to removing the masks I added some random bits of green using some different greens I had lying around. This aircraft is quite beaten up so I've got to try and simulate that... to point.

After I removed the masks I had a few touch ups, then I applied some different greys in various spots.

The next night I masked out the walkways and yellow leading edges.

The other thing I like about the acyclic paints,especially the Mr Color ones is that they are semi-gloss. This means that you can apply an oil wash directly over the without a protective gloss clear coat.

Prior to the oil wash I rubbed everything down with wet 12000 micromesh cloth just to knock an roughness of any of the flat paints I used.

I then applied a oil wash of Paynes grey and Mig Thinners all over the aircraft and then removed the excess.

 Onto the decals........