Written by 4:13 pm On the Bench

WIP : Hasegawa 1/48 F-16C 414th CTS Pt.2

I say. This project has been ongoing (mostly off) for almost 3 years! Who would have thunk. Time sure flies. Anyhow, before I get bitched to death by my friends who know about this project, I decided I really have to finish this one. So anyhow, I still don’t have a proper workdesk, but I lugged my compressor to the porch and started spraying on the steps. And here’s what I got so far after an hour.

There’s still some mistakes here and there but I thought, what the heck. I have to finish this quickly or it’ll forever in my Projects list.

I must say it’s quite fun to finally be able to airbrush again. I was very rusty though. Just look at the left wing which was where I started. The preshade’s very roughly done. Normally my preshades are quite roughly done, but this one is really quite bad heh. By the time I got to the right wing though, I was starting to get the hang of controlling my double action airbrush again. Hopefully tomorrow the weather will hold. Then can slap on the camouflage colors!

ONWARD HO!

Painting commences. The camouflage I am going to do is the ‘Flogger’ scheme, which tries to replicate the MiG-23/27 Flogger color scheme as flown by ex-Eastern-Bloc Air Forces. Markings will be from TwoBobs’ 48-001 ‘Fighting Fulcrum’ sheet. The sheet includes a camouflage guide which I use to trace the camo pattern onto the kit with a soft pencil.

Strangely though, some of the camouflage do not match up when put onto the kit so I did some guesstimation and compromised some here and there to get the final guides done.

The weather turned out to be good. It was dry and sunny out. So on with the lightest color first. And that would be light brown. I decided to use Buff straight from the bottle. After about an hour or so of spraying, the rain clouds started gathering, which in turn turned up the humidity, which in turn cauased water to seep into my airbrush, which in turn caused it to spray water onto my kit instead of paint. Damn. Had to stop after only magaing to finishing up the bottom. Oh well.

After I was done, I compared the resulting color I got with a reference picture I got from Airliners.net. The Buff turned out to be too yellowish. Gotta figure out a way to fix it in the next session.

While I know that colors of the real aircraft differs in each photo, I think mine differs way too much to be excused heh.

Painting continues. Today I originally planned to repaint the light brown. But then after the sun, I noticed that… hey… the color’s not that bad! Sure it lacks a bit of the reddish tone that the reference pic had, but at least it doesn’t look too yellow under the sun. So I decided to leave it as is since after my planned oil wash, the light brown will tone down considerably.

So on to the second color: dark brown. This is also straight from the bottle Vallejo Model Color ‘Red Brown’. While it turned out to be lighter than what I wanted, again the planned oil wash will tone down the shade.

The demarcation lines are all done freehand. Badly I might add. I really need to remaster my airbrush. As it is, the lines are really soft. More suitable for 1/35 scale. Reference photos show relatively tight demarkation lines. Not solid, just a bit soft. Grrr… looks like I will have to take out my stash of bluetack and do the demarkation lines that way.

I suck.

Anyway, hopefully I can add the final camouflage color tomorrow.

Well it rained the next day so I had to defer the 3rd color till this weekend. And this one was quickly finished up.

I must say the green is now much easier to put on than the two previous colors. I’ll chalk it up to being more used to airbrushing again I guess.

Based on the reference photo, my demarcation lines are too soft. To be honest, I don’t have that much confidence I can make them sharper by freehand. So after I have allowed some time for the paint to cure (mostly likely a week heh), I’ll take out my bluetack and proceed to do guides so I can respray the lines.

Stay tuned.

Build Log
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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