Black Camoflage

I have added the contrasting camoflage colour of black using Tamiya nato black lightened up with some deck tan. The demarcation line was masked with rolls of blu tac and the colour was finely sprayed on using low pressure and a fine tip on the air brush.





After the inital black camo is on a bit more deck tan is added to the colour cup of the air brush to further lighten the tone for the highlight.

The highlight colour is carefully sprayed to the center of each panel.

The masking of blu tac is now removed and any touch ups to the base colour is done.

Stay tuned for more to come....

Tamiya Crusader III 1:48

This is my new project, a Tamiya 1:48 scale Crusader III. The model has been assembled out of the box with the exception of a electical cable to the turret search light from fine copper wire and a tie down strap to the spare track linkjs from thin lead foil. I also plan to add a radio mast from brass wire after painting and weathering is complete.

The painting process begins with a fine coat of Floquil grimy black laquer paint, this is left for 24 hours to cure fully. This laquer paint tends to provide a good bond with the underlying plastic for the subsequent colour coats to stick to.









The next step was to mix up a nice brittish pale stone colour to use as the base camoflage colour for this tank. I chose to make a mix by eye  from the Tamiya colours: wooden deck tan, buff and desert yellow. This mix was carefully airbrushed on the whole vehicle paying attention to achieve a more transparent coat of paint nearer to the edges of panels and features and a more opaque coat towards the center of panels.

After this some deck tan was added to the mix in the airbrush colour cup to lighten the tone and the center of panels were picked out to add another level of highlighting.

Again more deck tan was added to the mix in the airbrush colour cup to lighten the tone and the center of the panels was picked out again to further add another level of fading and highlight.

This process was repeated a third time and just the very center of each panel was highlighted.

This has resulted in a really extreme sun fading effect to the base coat. This over eggsagerated efftect is important at this stage as subsequent filters, washes and weathering will all tone down and darken this coat of paint.

Next up is the dissruptive colour pattern of black, so stay tuned.

Cheers,

RGM 79G Sniper Finished

Well I finally found a little time to finish this guy off. I sprated a final flat coat of Tamiya glear mixed 50:50 with Tamiya flat base, this went on nice and flat ans its the best result I have had from this product so far. The model was set aside to dry thoroughly for 24 hours.

I added streaking from artidt oil paints to further weather the finish. The colours used were from the windsor and newton line and were lamp black, raw umber and titanium white. A small dot of oil colour from the end of a tooth pick was placed at the point where I wished a run to begin, a brush dampened with clean artist white spirit was then draged over the dot of paint in a downwards direction to create the streak, this process is then repeated to reduce the opacity of the streak to the desired finish.

To finish the peice off I used a 6B graphite pencil to add a pleasing metallic shine to certain edges, mainly on the details of the beam rifle. Now it's done - I'll let the pictures do the talking.

I hope that you enjoyed following this build as much as I did creating it. My next project will see a change of pace for we will be looking at a 1:48 armour peice, so until then,

Cheers.

Finally a little progress

Some progress has finally been made on this project.

I added a gloss coat of Tamiya gloss prior to the decals, then added the triangle markings using a masking tape template and brush painted tan colour. This was finished off with black borders using a 0.1mm permanent felt tip marker from an art shop.

Again all of this was gloss coated to protect it before the mig dark wash was used to pin wash all edges and engraved details.

The beam rifle was painted in Tamiya dark grey before it too was gloss coated and treated to the Mig dark wash.

To be continued....

Revealing the Camo

Well I'm back with another update. I managed to get the Tamiya  Nato green applied, I decided no to do any highlighting with the airbrush as I will have a go at using Sin Industries Filters to enhance this paint job.

The masking for the camoflage pattern was removed, and I am quite pleased with how this has come out. I will be going back to using the laquer primer in the future as the tamiya acrylic paints just have a better hold with this primer base. Without it the paint is very delicate and tends to scratch off easily.

I used a cotton bud to start to carefully remove the maskol to reveal the titanium gold chipping beneath. To my surprise this actually looks like a dark silver chipping now, you have to look at the chipping very carefully to realise that it is infact gold in colour.

All in all I'm quite pleased with the effect, I tried to keep the chipping as minimal as possible so as not to loose the camo effect.

To be continued.....

Painting - The real fun begins!

Again on this model I applied my maskol with the foam sponge technique for chipping paint. I'm interested to see how this might turn out with the titanium gold base coat.

The second photo shows a close up and you can see the maskol on the models surface.

I have settled on a colour combination for the camoflage after much research on the web and forum suggestions. I have decided to use a 2 tone dark green cam pattern. The darker green is Tamiya Japanese army green. Unusually this will be sprayed first as I want this colour to show through the lighter green base to follow.

I plan to mask in thin stripes of masking tape to give a highly geometric camoflage comprised of long rectangels and squares.

The colour chosen for the overall finish is Tamiya Nato green. These two greens are quite similar with one being slightly darker than the other. If this works out it should look quite cool.

Here are a couple of photos of the base coat of J.A. green applied over the titanium gold and maskol.

To be continued......