Rob's project leftover *finished*

[iggie]

Hi Rob, I have found that thinning with plain water works very well, but it must be on top of a primer; on bare plastic it will just bead. Other than that it thins well with Tamiya thinner, but not Xtracrylix. Humbrol's own thinner is ok, but not as good as Tamiya! Go figure?

[rob_van_riel]

Hi Rob, I have found that thinning with plain water works very well, but it must be on top of a primer; on bare plastic it will just bead. Other than that it thins well with Tamiya thinner, but not Xtracrylix. Humbrol's own thinner is ok, but not as good as Tamiya! Go figure?

Acrylics without primer is just asking for trouble, but thanks for the reminder. The Xtracrylix thinner has made it to my banned list a while back, after turning half a jar of their own paint into useless glop.

I just finished putting down a few layers of Airfix's approximation of Sky on the plane. The paint seemed to handle well thinned with plain old tap water.



Sky (well, beige green) was never going to be an easy colour to get decent coverage with, so the need for multiple layers was anticipated. I'm not so happy about what's happening around the air intake and in some of the panel lines though; it seems to be drying into a very pale tan there, and that's not what I had in mind.

I also suspect that I'll have to put some extra effort into the wing leading edge, because that seam clearly won't do

[rob_van_riel]

Now that's more like it

In retrospect, my initial coats were probably too wet. The third coat I put on was a much, much leaner mixture, but still managed a few "puddles". I then switched to thinning with a mixture of water and alcohol, and with that the paint no longer gets a chance to run, but is pretty much dry, or at least fixed in place, on impact. Two more coats of that, in an air-to-paint mixture that regularly had me wondering if anything but air was coming out of the brush, sorted the bottom rather nicely.
I'l shoot one or two coats of clear over it as a safety barrier later today, and start on the top on sunday.

[Molly-new]

Nice bottom.

[MarkyM607]

Glad to see your bottom is sorted out!

[rob_van_riel]

Nice bottom.

Careful now, if either of our Spitfires hears you say that, you might be in for it

[Purplethistle]

I thought that the first underside paint job looked like a nice well-weathered effect, I spent ages TRYING to get my Malta Spit looking similar!

[rob_van_riel]

I thought that the first underside paint job looked like a nice well-weathered effect, I spent ages TRYING to get my Malta Spit looking similar!

Well, now you know how to do it: grey primer followed by two just a bit too wet coats of Humbrol acrylic from the airbrush. Nothing looks like messed up paint like messed up paint..

From what little weathering/aging/etc I've done, I've found that relaxing my standards of care to the point where the job at hand turns into just a bit of a hash works better than anything I could deliberately come up with. It's a Bob Ross thing: not only do we have happy accidents, we deliberately provoke them

[rob_van_riel]

More airbrushing today, dark earth this time. I overdid it again on the first pass, and the paint promptly gathered into puddles, where it sat, separating into it's components faster that the water could evaporate. First the brown pigment dries, than the blueish grey stuff, and finally the last of the water goes. Predictably, the results weren't that great. Still, the result made for a good initial coat. I almost had in on the second pass, but one small puddle still managed to form and mess me up as above.
I suspect the way my compressor behaves has something to do with it; if I set a certain pressure, it drops below that once the air starts flowing, in turn messing up the paint flow. I'll set pressure with air floing through the airbrush from here on, see if that improves things. It certainly seems to have worked for the third and final coat of dark earth, and the barrier coat of clear that followed it.
Green to follow early next week..

[rob_van_riel]

The spitfire just returned from the paintshop. Sky and earth worked as advertised, and the canopy remained clear. Beyond that, things were less desirable..



The overly soggy coat of earth had found a way to creep under the masking tape. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with the stuff



Worse is the bad behaviour of the green paint. Even more than the other two, this paint just doesn't want to stay mixed; the components separate almost as fast as I can mix them. The keep this up in the airbrush, and as a result, the airbrush either clogs up with nearly pure pigment, or (on different settings) throws out more paint than I need. The result is an anything but even coat.



After this, I'm going back to enamels again for a while, just to recover/cool down I'll still have any number of problems that way, but at least with enamels I know how I manage mess things up, and what to do about it.

[rob_van_riel]

I've been puttering away with some green paint and a small brush, and I have some hope I managed to fix the green on the wings. I'll hit it with a few layers of clear as a barrier cote before tackling the canopy frames and the corrections on the underside; with these top colours, I don't want to be doing work that's going to involve getting my fingers all over the model trying to get a good grip before I have some fingerprint preventer in place..

[rob_van_riel]

That fix wasn't nearly as good as it seems. After a coat of clear, it is painfully obvious the the touched-up section is a completely different colour than the airbrushed bits
I guess I'll have to get creative about this

[Molly-new]

It's strange how the occasional kit refuses to accept paint, I have had a similar problem in the past and went down the 'strip back and re-paint' route.

[rob_van_riel]

It's strange how the occasional kit refuses to accept paint

Hmmmm... I'm more concerned with certain "equivalent" alternatives to nasty old solvent based materials being forced on us despite being nowhere near equivalent. Acrylic paints come to mind... I've been trying to get them to work for me off and on for twenty odd years, and despite the fact that the quality of enamels hasn't exactly improved over those years, they're still miles ahead of the waterbased toys (and with the requirement to prime first, I suspect even the supposed "green" credentials of acrylics are nixed - the nastiest stuff I use by some margin is the primer).
These days I consider "obsolete" and "environmentally unfriendly" to be the best indications of a good product short of an outright ban.

Anybody got a ticket back to the 80s lying around, I incresingly find myself longing for one

[rob_van_riel]

Repairs to the paintwork on the port wing were not successful, and I had to resort to repainting the wing. That, on the other hand, worked out better than I'd dared to hope. Before and after on the left and right.



Now, for that mess I made of the of the underside...