Applying Dark Earth and painting-masks to the fuselage

Hello again. This time I will describe, how I painted the fuselage and tail in dark earth and how I applied the TopNotch painting-masks for the camouflage.

This is the first model for which I will use AK Real Colors. Up to now I used mainly Gunze colors but AK really offers a great variety of paints and they have very fine pigments. I can highly recommend them.

As I already stated in my last post it is important to create a realistic look especially for such a big model. So this is how I tried to achieve it:

I started the camouflage-painting with the tails. The mixture I use is 50% color and 50% thinner, in this case Mr. Color Levelling Thinner. For applying I fitted my Infinity-Airbrush with the 0,2 mm Nozzle.

I spray at a pressure of 2,5 bar. This combination makes it easy to apply the paint in thin layers not destroying the preshading-effect.

When this was finished I applied a second shade lightened with Tamiya flat white and thinned to a ratio of 30% color and 70% thinner to the inner surfaces of the panels.

The last step is to blend this in into the basic color by carefully applying a mix of 20% of the basic color and 80% thinner.

The result can be seen in the photo above and in the following pictures:

Right tail

Left tail

Rear fuselage

Forward fuselage

The result looks quite convincing to me that maybe even no panel-line washing will be necessary in the end. We will see.

Next thing to do was to apply the masks

to the tail and fuselage. Again I started with the tail. The masks are very thin and adhere well to the surface. I use the back of an old brush and Q-Tips to rub the mask to the surface in critical places. I had to use Tamiya tape in places where necessary. This is especially important in the gap between the tail surface and the elevator to avoid paint blowing through the gaps:

Each mask was given the number of the application-plan because they could be used twice.

When applying the masks on the fuselage you have to take care to align them with the masks to be used on the wings. My friend Sven made the experience that the

masks don’t fit correct if you do not align them before.

Therefore I attached the wings to the fuselage and applied all masks in the area between fuselage and wings. Here you can see what I had to do to achieve a correct alignment:

Left wing: mask no 20A was added and no 3 was placed correctly. Same applies to the mask on the leading edge. It is too short and I have to add an extra piece to reach the demarcation line between upper and lower camouflage color. There is room for improvement TopNotch...

Right wing: I had to add mask 19A to 19

and 8A to 8 in order to get it right. I also cut out the small part at the left trailing edge which is not considered by TopNotch but present on all Lancasters I have seen.

The masks for the canopy and forward fuselage don’t fit well so I used a mix of the TopNotch masks and Tamiya tape to get it right:

This is how the complete fuselage looks like with all masks applied:

Left side

Right side

With this picture I close my post for today.

Next time I will show you how I applied the

dark green to fuselage and tail and how I painted the lower tail surfaces and the rudders in RAF Night.

I hope that you liked this post and I look

forward to meeting you again with the next post.