Evil Carrot and his bag of strings (Tamiya 1/48 Swordfish)

[EvilCarrot]

This cutey will be my entry for the SIG, sorry for the blurry pics.

[EvilCarrot]

Time for some progress pics

The canvas represents clear doped linen with red primer from the outside showing through. Canvas parts were masked off and the whole cockpit was sprayed with Tamiya XF-71


Some light chipping with a silver watercolour pencil. The top part shows some colour modulation, done using green watercolour pencils and Tamiya brown panel line wash.


Same effect on the rest of the cockpit:



Practiced my brush painting skills on the pilot figures. Base colours, shadows and highlights were painted with acrylics and enhanced with Tamiya Brown panel line wash in some areas.




Oh no, a gap! Worst Tamiya kit ever!


That's all for now, folks!

[Timplastic]

Nice work Seb will follow along

[EvilCarrot]

Not very good at updating these, here's a couple of progress pics:

Most of the basic painting has been done, upper wings were painted with MRP 117 Dark slate grey and and Mr Hobby H333 Extra Dark Sea grey. I then mottled some heavily diluted lighter colours on top with a 0.2 needle airbrush to get a slight faded paint effect. Still thinking about how I'm gonna do the weathering.


While looking for info on the right colours to use (the Tamiya callouts were wrong) I came upon some info about "shadow shading" on biplanes. Apparently the lower wings on RAF/FAA biplanes were painted a lighter shade than the upper wings to compensate for the shadow cast by the the upper wing. So for the lower wings I used MRP 116 Light Slate gray and Mr. Hobby H331 Dark Sea Gray, again mottled with some lighter colours.


The underside of the wings and most of the fuselage were first primed in MRP white primer, then given a couple of coats of MR Hobby H1 Gloss white. White paint is a pain in the backside, I hate it, it sucks, white paint should be outlawed... but I somehow managed to make it look acceptable (by my standards ) Once again I used lighter shades of... erm how do I "fade" white paint??? Looking at some reference pictures I noticed a couple of aircraft where the white started to "yellow". I decided to once again use the same "mottling" technique, first some heavily thinned off-white, then heavily thinned clear yellow. The result reminds me of the time I still wore white undies (ahhh, the memories, should've added some brown for accuracy...) but I quite like it.

[Twokidsnosleep]

Coming along nicely
Really like the camo painting

[TommyKillander]

Wow!

This looks fantastic!


Tommy

[EvilCarrot]

The last post (better get my bugle out)

So, I started masking the ribs on the wings and it sucked...bigtime...

The idea is to mask the ribs and to spray a heavily diluted coat of a dark color (like Tamiya Smoke) to make the ribs stand out a bit more. The masking is boring as hell and uses up a lot of tape. I gave up after the first wing and figured out an easier way to get the same effect.

I made a cocktail of paint, Transparator (aka. "not varnish, we swear!") and some obscure brand of thinner, I used Burnt Umber for the white surfaces and Anthracit for the camo:


Sprayed it in a very light coat to darken the surface slightly:



Afterwards I went over the raised ribs with the same obscure brand of buffer:


The end result:


I had to do a bit of experimenting...

before I got it right but the end result was worth it and saved me a lot of time. It also worked on the curved raised areas that would have been very difficult to mask.

Next up was a bit of experimenting with metallics:



To get this worn copper effect I used the following, from left to right:


Unfortunately, things went downhill from there, here's some of the problems I dealt with.
- Paint not drying resulting in fingerprints everywhere and dust getting trapped in it
- Damaging the paint when trying to remove said fingerprints/dust
- Even though the wing assembly was well engineered, gluing them together and aligning them properly was a nightmare
- The photo-etch wiring was a pain in the backside ("STICK, YOU DAMNED SUPERGLUE!")

So, after many hours of frustration I gave the whole thing a gloss coat with Alclad Aqua Gloss, a pinwash with a mixture of Tamiya black and brown wash (about 50/50) and started sticking on the extra bits.


After that I gave the darker parts of the model a bit of drybrushing with Winsor & Newton Transparent white oil paint and added the antennae and control wires. For the end result see the reveal thread.

Thank you very much for reading!