Written by 11:42 am On the Bench

WIP : Hasegawa 1/72 VF-0D Pt.3 – Painting & Finishing

I’m attempting another approach to painting this time so I’m skipping the black base + marble coat approach. This begins with a base coat Tamiya Gray Finishing Surfacer. The white areas were spots that I had to go back in to fix again.

For the color scheme, I’m going with the 3-tone camouflage used by the IDFAF on their F-15I Ra’am, which also carry the Rafael Popeye missile.

I started with an overall coat of Mig AMMO Middlestone.

Then the usual blutack to mask off the demarcation lines.

The second color is AK Interactive RAF Sky.

Then more blutack masking with the third color being AK Interactive Dark Tan.

The result looks very light so I did a quick visual comparison with the F-100F kit I was building that used the same AK Interactive Dark Tan. The F-100F had my usual black base with white marble coat, which resulted in a deeper brown color. Which one is better is subjective though: The VF-0D was faster but the F-100F was visually more interesting.

The nose was painted Mig AMMO Light Compass Ghost Gray.

The bottom was then painted Model Air Dark Ghost Gray after masking off a solid demarcation line from the color scheme on top.

After all the colors were done, I went back in and finetuned the demarcation lines.

It took a few rounds of back and forth but I was finally happy with the results.

Another thing I’m trying for this build is painting a light shade of every color into the middle of each panel. Each color was lightened about 30%.

I like how the result looks although I think a gloss coat will likely hide all the work done. If I ever do this again I think I’ll need to lighten the colors more.

This highlighting method is not as obvious on the gray areas.

The rest of the parts were then painted accordingly.

Because I wanted to make sure the highlights are visible, I didn’t gloss the kit before decals. I carefully buffed with a polishing sponge instead to get a smoother finish which should eliminate any chance of silvering. The decals proved to be fragile and a few of them tore. I did have to paint the white leading edge lights on the wings instead of using the decals though. Annoyingly, I’ve taken care of the decals but they still degraded. Once cured, I sprayed an overall semi-gloss coat to seal all the decals.

I then gave the whole kit a panel wash using thinned Abteilung Starship Filth, which has become my go-to panel wash color now.

The canopy was then attached, painted the base of the wingtip lights with silver paint and did additional minor weathering.

I did spot fading, streaking and staining using Starship Filth, Neutral Gray and White oil paints. Then the whole kit was given a mist coat of flat to knock down some of the remaining shiny spots that look out of place.

I then attached the weapons and thrusters. The thrusters were friction fit into place carefully so as to not scratch anything.

The last steps were removing the canopy masking, attaching the clear parts on the nose (which were painted smoke gray) and the wingtip lights were painted with transparent blue and red.

And I’m finally done after procrastinating for far too long.

Build Log
Part 1 – Construction | Part 2 – Construction | Part 3 – Painting & Finishing

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