Quickie: 1:72 Dewoitine D-520

[Jim R]

Hi Jakko
When the spraying is done and the masking is off it will all be worth it.
Jim

[Guest]

As long as the stripes are relatively even, I’ll be happy. Problem is that it’s often harder to see that from just the tape than after the tape has been removed …

[Guest]

The nose is now masked too, though I had to guess at the exact way the stripes curve in towards the spinner. I took a stab at it that I’m happy enough with:

[ATTACH]437692[/ATTACH][ATTACH]437693[/ATTACH]

Now to thin some red paint for airbrushing …

Edit: that’s going to be fun. One of the two pots of red paint I have, is like this:

[ATTACH]437694[/ATTACH]

I think I’ll see if the other is any better, but because it’s an old bottle of Tamiya flat red acrylic, I’m not convinced it will be — that particular paint doesn’t age well, is my experience

[Tim Marlow]

Tamiya paint is quite easy to reconstitute with MLT Jakko, a bit like the old humbrols used to be. Water based acrylic is like trying to redissolve a boiled egg though!

[Guest]

It’s not that it goes thick — well, not more than other acrylic paint — but that the colour becomes paler. Old Tamiya flat red, in my experience is often more a dark pink than actual red.

I tried thinning the Revell paint first, and attempt No. 2 worked I tried isopropanol first, but that just created slightly red alcohol with slivers of paint in it. After rinsing the cup I tried tap water instead, and that went fine. It was then mostly a matter of finding the right proportions, spraying on some kitchen towel and (eventually) the underside of the wing. Then I went over the yellow areas:

[ATTACH]437695[/ATTACH]

I think I’ll leave it to harden for an hour or so before removing the tape.

[Guest]

Moment of truth …

[ATTACH]437727[/ATTACH][ATTACH]437728[/ATTACH]

That seems to have gone pretty well. The only place where paint really bled under the tape is on the right horizontal tailplane, which is because I ran out of paint when I only had that left to do. I mixed up some more, but it turned out slightly too thin, I noticed as I sprayed it onto the model.

I’ll now need to mask the curving lines to these areas on the fuselage sides before spraying the camouflage.

[adt70hk]

Jakko

That has turned out beautifully!! A great job.

ATB.

Andrew

[Jim R]

Well done. That's a success in anyone's book. Yellow and red are difficult colours to use anyway.
Jim

[Tim Marlow]

There now, aren’t you glad you made the effort Jakko :thumb2: :thumb2: :thumb2:
Seriously, looks good to me.

[Guest]

That has turned out beautifully!! A great job.

Thanks

Well done. That's a success in anyone's book. Yellow and red are difficult colours to use anyway.

Thanks. I’m most pleased about getting the lines to match fairly well, instead of one side being noticeably closer together than the other or something To be honest, I don’t find yellow or red difficult colours to use, as long as you 1) spray them and 2) do so over a light base coat. Brush-painting them over a dark colour is asking for trouble, in my experience.

There now, aren’t you glad you made the effort Jakko :thumb2: :thumb2: :thumb2:
Seriously, looks good to me.

Thanks Like I said, it was mainly a question of “do I want to go to this trouble?” To which the answer very often is, “not particularly, but I’ll do it anyway because it looks cool”

When looking at the pictures I posted above, by the way, I’m put in mind of a circus tent …

[Tim Marlow]

As flown by Ronald Macdonald……..

[Guest]

I followed Tim’s advice for masking the curved ends for the striped parts. First, I scanned the painting instructions, opened the scan in Adobe Illustrator and resized it to be the same length as the model, then drew the curved lines over it. After deleting the scan again, I had just the lines left, which I printed out and then cut out so I had a template to use for cutting the masking tape. Once that was done, I filled in the other bits with more tape:

[ATTACH]437860[/ATTACH]

Then I sprayed first the tail white, followed by the upper surfaces with Hataka gris-bleu foncé (“dark grey-blue”):

[ATTACH]437861[/ATTACH]

Note I had forgotten to mask the red on the tail when I took the first picture, so I had to do that real quick with the white already in my airbrush

I’ve decided to paint the upper bits first, rather than the paler lower sides, because this way I can get a neat lower edge to the camouflage, where all the patches line up, by having them go down a bit too far and then spraying the underside colour over them to make a straight line.

[Tim Marlow]

Looks like it’s coming along nicely Jakko. Typical aircraft build though, more and more masking tape until you can hardly see the thing :tongue-out3:

[Guest]

The masking would have been much simpler if I hadn’t been goaded into doing the striped plane … :tongue-out: But this should be the only masking, as the camouflage pattern will be sprayed freehand, and the lower wing and fuselage colour almost certainly will be too.

[Guest]

After drawing the camouflage pattern on the plane, I sprayed first the dark brown:

[ATTACH]438205[/ATTACH]

This may be an odd colour to start with, but I noticed two places where the green appears to have overlapped the brown, or at least, the brown went “around” a green patch, so I decided to do it in this order.

Next, I used the khaki colour, but it was far too brown for my liking, so I put the green from the Hataka set in my airbrush instead, and sprayed over the two khaki patches I had already done. This is anything but dark green, though, and very transparent. I had to go over the green twice and in places three times to get it to cover the pencil marks.

[ATTACH]438204[/ATTACH]

Next, I went back to the grey base colour, because the dark brown especially had a lot more overspray than I liked. Spraying a little more of the grey over that largely fixed the problem:

[ATTACH]438203[/ATTACH]

Then the paler grey on the underside, though it’s hardly lighter than the grey on the top:

[ATTACH]438202[/ATTACH][ATTACH]438201[/ATTACH]

Before taking off the masking, I had to also paint the blue stripe on the rudder, so a quick bit of masking and some work with a brush:

[ATTACH]438200[/ATTACH]

The blue, by the way, is Vallejo IDF Blue, which looks a decent match for the blue used in the decals of this kit.

And then, the moment of truth …

[ATTACH]438199[/ATTACH][ATTACH]438198[/ATTACH]