spejic

There are many different techniques. They generally start with a light wood color for the whole deck and then various techniques to vary the colors (just using washes, masking planks with itty bitty bits of tape and overpainting many times, highlighting individual planks with colored pencil, so on). However these are mostly for battleships whose decks are weathered and more built for practicality than looks. The Titanic's deck is remarkably uniform in color with wood that had a very tight grain so there isn't much you can do at that scale. If the model has raised planking detail you might try picking it out with a near-black. There are many period pictures of the deck, and you can take some hints from the Titanic movie as well.

I think so too. I tested all the glues and similar substances I have with the pigments I have. I dropped them onto the test surface as a single bead to see what kind of shape they retain when the dry. Here are the results: PVA CONTROL smooth and rounded arcylic does not mix enamel really does not mix watercolor tube dries smooth and round, but noticibly weaker pastel dust almost works. dries flat and lumpy but strong two-part epoxy CONTROL smooth and slightly rounded arcylic does not mix enamel almost works. slightly weaker, dries flatter watercolor tube does not mix pastel dust works. similar shape and strength Acrylic gloss medium CONTROL smooth and rounded arcylic works, but much flatter in shape enamel does not mix watercolor tube does not mix pastel dust does not mix well, dries lumpy Future CONTROL smooth and totally flat arcylic works, a little gummy enamel does not mix watercolor tube does not mix pastel dust does not mix well Testors non-toxic tube glue CONTROL smooth and very flat arcylic does not mix enamel mixes, but looses lots of its adhesion to plastic watercolor tube does not mix at all pastel dust mixes, but looses lots of its adhesion to plastic cyanoacrylate CONTROL dries dusty and slightly rounded arcylic does not mix at all enamel does not mix at all watercolor tube they violently repell each other pastel dust does not mix at all I think two-part epoxy and pastel dust will work for what I need. I just have to figure out how to hold the antenna in place for half an hour while it dries.

You combine a prop modeler's eye for what is photogenic with a hobby modeler's concern for detail. I love the feeling of scale these additions create.

I need to install a tiny antenna on a model and I wanted to simulate the bright red insulator at the bottom. It's way too small to fashion a separate plastic part, and its position would make it very difficult to paint by brush. I thought the obvious solution would be to mix a paint and a glue and put a drop at the base of the antenna. So I did some tests on some scrap to see what worked best. The problem is, none of it worked at all. I've tried various types of paints mixed with many different glues and all of them destroyed the glue's strength. Acrylic gels mix fine with paint but they dry extremely flat ruining the look and making a poor bond. Heavy body artist paint by itself wasn't strong enough. Is there some other kind of glue or material that might work here? Or maybe some other way of coloring it?

email sent. I will put this information up on my web site eventually.

Condor Decals made a sheet for that ("Latin Hawks" number 72022) 15 years ago. I have no idea how available that sheet is these days. Building a A-4AR from a Fujimi A-4M is mostly adding a lot of bumps and taking a few off. This biggest problem is the cockpit, which needs major reworking. If you actually want to do this, I can help. I built one of these up to the point of the first layer of paint, where it's been for the last few years. You know, I really should finish it one of these days.

I've got a Harrier Gr.7 with acrylics and enamels and lacquers over each other in every possible combination and it looks fine years later. You just have to make sure the undercoats are dry (really, really dry - for some enamel brands this might take months) before putting something different on top.

That's a really tricky thing to do because the light on the real aircraft may not be appropriate to the image on the model, and the high level of detail in the photographic image may not match the detail level of the model. So you had a unique situation, but the finished model really looks excellent.

The decals you made are amazing. Could you tell us more about the technique you used?

Mostly out of the box. I extended the intake back a bit and I added some minor changes to the cockpit. These are kit decals, but the Pit-Road kit has almost no warning or stencil decals so some I printed myself. The bombs come from the Revell Tornado Gr.1 kit. The kit mostly goes together well. For some reason I had trouble fitting the wing to the fuselage, and I had to hack away a big chunk of the internals to make them come together. The airbrake requires lots of filling if you pose it closed. And the long pylons require bending to fit the wing. That stupid port canard broke off so many times. It caused me weeks and weeks of repeated repairs and repaints. The snap-fit nature of the kit shows in the gear wells. I probably should have spend some time cutting all that away. I had to weather the belly a bit to hide some paint issues.

That is an amazingly sharp and flawless finish, and the very subtle weathering is perfectly appropriate. It's fine if they are detail pictures, like you did. I would get annoyed at 30 pictures of the whole aircraft at slightly different angles.

I still use it for most kits.

This was close to finished at the end of the 2018 Shelf Queens group build but I had such a painful time getting the front canopy to sit right that I put the thing in a box until the day I forgot my pain and glued in the last 2 parts. Well tonight I forgot the pain and glued in the last two parts. Here is the finished aircraft: There were an extensive number of additions and changes to the kit. See the group build thread for pictures of the now nearly hidden interior. I used a He-162-style ejection seat because it was a more modern construction better suited to a Luft '46 production aircraft and not at all because the correct style of seat no longer fit in my modified cockpit and I had one of these lying around.

It depends on the artistic statement you want to make. Once you add covers to the aircraft, it adds a story to it - it stops being instance of airplane and starts being airplane in a particular state (like, say, in a hanger awaiting its next flight).