As usual it was 2 coats, a day apart of Tamiya X22 Clear thinned with Lacquer thinners. The lacquer thinners I'm using at the moment makes the X22 go cloudy but this doesn't affect the finish.
I usually give the first coat 8-12 hours to dry before giving it a light wet sand with mirromesh 1200. After that I give it a wipe with a damp rag to clean of the dust and once dry shoot another coat of X22.
After letting this dry and harden for 5 days it was onto the decals....
I wasn't happy with Zotz's depiction of the upper roundel for NZ4540. The Ventura Publications "Pacific Twins" book as an image of the upper wing of NZ4540. To me, the roundel in the image is quite faded, but not as light as Zotz depict. I also think the Zotz roundel is to large compared to the on in the book. Of course I could be completely wrong.
I have all 3 decal sheets (as far as I know) that feature 1/48 RNZAF Venturas but as I discovered, each have slightly different sizes for the upper decals, plus there are actually different "versions" of the roundels. None of which I deemed suitable (again I could be completely off base here). I did consider a Avenger rounder for the old Aeromaster sheet but it has the blue strip around the white. Although I could cut it off I decided to save that for the Avenger.
So I decided that I'd give making a mask and painting the roundel. I had a set of dividers , some wad punches and a circle cutter.
First I cut the circle the size of the roundel, I actually went through several different sizes until I was happy. To try and get it in the right spot I actually placed the cut circle on the wing first, then I placed the mask around it and removed the circle.
Once happy I painted the circle using Mr Color #72 Intermediate Blue. Whilst waiting for the blue to dry I used the circle cutter to cut the outer edge of the white ring. The roundel mask with the big hole was applied to the wing.
Using a wad punch I punched out a mask for the inner blue ring and then put this into the appropriate position (sorry no photos so I hope this makes sense). I then airbrushed the white ring using Tamiya flat white.
To apply the white stripes I worked out what size I wanted and cut a rectangle out of Tamiya tape. This was applied across the entire roundel and then I masked around it. This helped to ensure I got the proportions the same on both wings.
Once masked I removed the rectangular strip and airbrushed the white.
All the masks, except the big circle was removed. This was left to touch up some of the edges with the dark blue of the wing.
Once masks were removed I wasn't entirely happy with the outer edge of the white. The diameter of this was as small as the circle cutter could cut and I didn't get as good an edge as I'd hoped. I gave the roundel a light sand with a 4000 micromesh pad to remove the ridges.
Luckily I had a wad cutter slightly smaller in diameter than the ring (3/8 IIRC), so I cut 2 masks, stuck them over the centre of the roundel. A quick burst with the airbrush and I was happy.
The next challenge will be simulating the faded numbers on the tail....
No comments :
Post a Comment