Actually it was a very enjoyable week even though hardly any modelling work got done. Celebrated my birthday on Monday with my girlfriend in London, had a great time. She's likely to be making more visits in the future now she knows how nice my new house is, so I'm going to have to do some work on getting the shed habitable as the model gear will bet forced out into the shed. In the meantime, as soon as she left, it all got put back in the workroom and progress was resumed!
We are not the stage of painting now, so first off lets try some pre-shading...
yeah, I'm not very good with the pre-shading yet. Still need to practice it more! Next was the underside. This was a custom mix of Tamiya XF 18 with some buff added to fade it out a little. The paint surface came out VERY matt, so had to be sanded down a little, but worked out okay. The pre-shading doesn't really show through very well - again more practice needed.
On the topside, I sprayed the inner port wing with a patch of flat aluminium and coated it with a layer of Klear and then when dry, a layer of hairspray. This is to allow some paint chipping where there will be wear from the pilot mounting the aircraft. It will also be the area where my father's figure will be sitting.
I then masked the entire underside and once the hairspray patch was fully dry, sprayed the entire topside with another custom mix of XF 52 and buff again to give it a mode faded/sun-bleached look. While this was drying I scanned a page from the On Target Profile 12, hawker Hurricane in RAD and Commonwealth Service by Aviation Workshop. This page depicts a Hurricane IID from 5 Sqn in July 1953. I resized the scanned image and printed it out to use as templates for the masking of the RAF green. The scan and print out came out slightly small which worked nicely as I was using blue tac to shape the exact demarcation lines of the camo so this worked out well.
The detached tail and elevators were similarly masked and one of the removed panels from the port side was also masked to add the green camo. Again I used a custom mix of XF-81 Dark Green 2 (RAF) with some buff to simulate the sun fading and sprayed this as well. Once the masking was off, I could finally see if my masking of the open panels and cockpit had leaked...
and I am very pleased to say that they didn't!!! Phew!
I then removed the tissue packing/masking from the wheel well:
I've also done the paint chipping on the port wing and next job will be to give this the whole things a spray with Klear to form the base for the panels washes and initial weathering.
Finally for this update, I order some laser-cut paper Jungle foliage which I've then painted with oil paints to give an interesting variation to the vegetation:
Not entirely sure it works well - I may need to add more to make it a bit more "jungle-like" - any suggestions?
I know I will definitely produce a better model later in the year when I do the 1:32 Hobbyboss Spitfire Vb trop converted into a Vc trop as would have been used when my Dad was with 81 Sqn in Algeria in 1943! Watch for that one later this year :D
