Spitfire Painting Has Begun!

I've started the ever dangerous painting process. So much can go wrong here. Surface preparation, paint mixture, dust/particles, humidity, moisture in the line, the airbrush needle tip, spurts, runs... an earthquake... A terrible flood! Locusts! Only experience can deal with most of these. Since this is my third model, second aircraft, using an airbrush in the past four years, I am far from comfortable and not where I want to be with the results. So get off my back already. Let's see how it went!

Before priming the model with a gray coat, I airbrushed the canopy with the color I wanted it to be on the inside, in this case RAF Dark Green.

Glamor shot of the other side. A little over spray on the wing there, the primer will take care of that!

After spraying all the parts with primer. Don't worry Dear, I didn't spray it right there.

While examining my work after the primer dried, I noticed a few of the smaller parts didn't turn out so well. I stripped them down and re-primed those. After that, I realized I forgot the main landing gear covers altogether. Had to go back and prime those little gems. Did you know, by adding those covers on the main landing gear, they reduced drag and increased the Spitfire's max speed?

Front on view, it didn't turn out too bad.

I'm sure you can figure out which side this is.

Yikes! What happened here? Well, it's a terrible job at pre-shading. Pre-shading is just a matter of painting flat black lines on all the panel lines. It doesn't have to be perfect and as you can see, it definitely is not. Straight lines would be nice, but spraying straight lines is just freaking hard.

I was having some trouble a couple of days ago with pre-shading. I couldn't get the mixture right, it was spurting and running on me, the needle tip in the airbrush was bent, and the tip kept collecting paint which was disturbing the spray pattern. You might as well have just tossed in the earthquake and locusts while you were at it. After blotching up parts of the upper right wing, I just gave up for the night incredibly frustrated. I started on the upper side as it will have a darker color and will cover most of the pre-shading anyway. That way, I could get some practicing in.

I straightened the needle tip on my sanding stick and learned not to hold the airbrush too close to the model. Today I had some success with pre-shading, but I determined to get through it this time around regardless. The entire model was pre-shaded after some length of time. Remember those little parts I told you about and being careful so you don't knock them off? Well, I knocked off the pitot tube and had to re-attach it. That's what happens when you get frustrated and start to man-handle things.

More of that hot mess.

The bottom color RAF "Sky" was applied. Most of that pre-shading terribleness disappears, but you want to leave enough coming through to give the paint job depth and make it a little more interesting to look at.

Back to the little parts lesson. While I was putting the Sky color on, I nearly broke of the antenna mast. I had to re-glue it to strengthen it up.

That's that for now. When I had finished with the bottom color I added a little white to the cup to do some post-shading inside some of the panels. Again, attempting to add some more depth here. Things were not going so well. I had collected a massive amount of water in my line that was not caught by the moisture trap, thankfully no paint was harmed during this debacle. Paint was not coming out, the compressor had been running non-stop for at least an hour and a half and was scorching hot to the touch, so I decided to call it a day. I did lighten a few panels and you can kind of tell in person.

I'll let this cure at least one day before masking it off to paint the upper side. There are a few questionable areas on the bottom side I'm not too wild about, but not incredibly noticeable to people other than me. I, however, will always know they are there. Like the heart beating under the floor boards, slowly driving me mad.

At some point I'll have to provide my lessons learned about my siphon fed airbrush.

Stop now if you're not interested in reading some airbrush ramblings.

Since you asked here you go. With siphon fed airbrushes the paint jar is on the bottom and paint is sucked upward. A gravity fed brush, the cup is on top and gravity does the rest.

The big downfalls are paint amount, angles, the bottle and cleaning. With a gravity fed brush you can put as much paint in the cup as you need and take it down to empty, potentially wasting little to no paint. With a siphon fed, you can hold a lot more paint but can only take the paint down to the level where the tube can suck it up, guaranteeing that you will always waste paint. When your paint is low, it takes me to my second point, angles.

If you are pointing the airbrush in a downward angle and your paint amount is low, the paint will pool away from the center of the jar where your tube is and you will spray a whole lot of nothing. Your only options are to spray with your brush parallel to the floor or add more paint.

Point number drei. If you are spraying something close, the bottle you have dangling there will be sure to get in the way. 

Cleaning is a bit of a pain in the neck. Not only do you have to clean the airbrush, you also have to clean the jar and the siphon tube.

Before the next model, I think a new gravity fed airbrush is in order. Can I Dear, can I? I promise I'll go to work everyday and everyone will still get shelter and three squares a day!