Painting continued...
After the silver was laid on a series of sparying, cleaning, and changing colors occured until I got tired of cleaning the airbrush. This was all done to hide and break up the seams and rough edges in the foam. After the silver base coat, a non-metalic light gray was added along panel lines using a piece of paper. This gave a dull effect, like well worn aluminium, but was not quite what I was looking for. The airbrush was cleaned and black was used to add more detailed panel lines, hatches, and other markings to the P51. The black however was too dark and deliberate. The brush was cleaned again, and a light, almost white, silver was mixed. This was used to dull out most of the black, as well as weaken the dull lookin gray.
Clean, and clean again
This started making the airplane look in the general direction I wanted. I still wan't convinced, as I did not like the sparkel, so I cleaned the airbrush again and sprayed a clear white overcoat to everything. Enough was enough, I still had the sparkel, so I and began painting on the USAAF decals. The template I had cut for the wing was perfect but ended up way too large for the side of the fusalage. The brush was cleaned again, restocked with a now slightly darker mixed silver, and sprayed over the mistake on the port side of the fuse. I had the silver in hand so I made a few more wear stripes on the control surfaces, and added some highlights here and there.
The next morning, I recut some paper templates for smaller USAAF stars along with some squadern letters. The bush was cleaned each time as I switched between the 3 colors, blue, white, and black. Comming up with a good system to clean your airrush is almost manditory. More over, every problem I've ever had with the brush is due to it needing to be cleaned. Currently I'm settled on using Q-tips to clean the bulk of the paint out, then spraying rubbing alcohol through the brush, wiping the needle down -pretty much constantly. The alcohol is setup like a large paint bottle so I can just plug it in, spray, clean the needle, spray again, re-clean the needle, and then swap the paint. Tedious, but worth it in the end.
I was finally satisfied when I took the non-metalic black to add the final details to the plane. I didn't want a heavy exaust on the silver since you don't see it on real ones, at least not like you do on other painted planes. I began "smoking up" the decals when I noticed that the black didn't really show on the silver anyhow. What it did do was create the perfect worn effect I was looking for. With all the decals and squadren markings, the paint job was finally complete. Well, almost...
Onto page seven or previous page