This method takes a lot of frustration from painting canopies, you just need patience and technique, not artistic ability IMHO.

And here's the Meteor with the roundels painted - apologies for the "quick'n'dirty" photo.   With hindsight, I would have traced and done the fin flash with the Silhouette as well; as it was, I used Tamiya tape and it was probably a lot more work.

One more colour to do, ie black for the unit codes, serials and walkways.  I'm doing VT112/XL-S of 226 OCU, a fighter training unit based at RAF Bentwaters in the immediate post-war years.  (As an aside, they also operated a few Tempest IIs, and my SH example is earmarked for XL-Y.)

Thanks for looking.

The kit, produced by Peter Castle of Airscale fame is a mixture of very finely and detailed 3D parts and injection moulded parts, the latter comprising the fuselage, wings, horizontal tailplanes and canopy. At the time of writing, the kit is not yet available, this is an early test kit only. I have produced masks for the two marking options in this kit, R8884 of 183 Squadron and JP843 of 197 Squadron. They are available to download here and here

The cockpit "time lapse":

Painted, assembled and decalled:

Seat belts added and temporarily in place in the fuselage:

More later!

Max

Have fun!

Kev

I am working on LSP on the Border 35th scale Spitfire. This is how it must look when finished.

I made the roundels the old fashion way by cutting up tape

But now I have trouble finding the right letters for the V, S and the serial number.

Anyone here who can help me with this problem?

Thanx Rick

so to speak, I finally unpacked my Silhouette Portrait 3, downloaded and registered the device, searched for and watched several tutorials, but...

to start with something simple, I would have decided to create my own masks for the spiral on the spinner and the individual number for the Yak-3 Special Hobby 1/32.

I tried scanning the decal sheet and photographing it. I managed to import both files into the dedicated program, but apparently I can't detect the contours of the scanned copy. better with the one photographed, highlighting the contrasts.

scanned one

and .jpg

I managed by trial and error to isolate the spiral and arrive at this point

now I would like to join the main points of the curves, eliminating what is unnecessary and disturbing, but I can't find the right command (or sequence of commands).

even getting just this far was quite frustrating, the tutorials I found didn't enlighten me, and the site manual doesn't go into detail, I think.

Do you kindly have any more detailed tutorials or manuals?

TIA, cheers, Paolo

So I decided to make masks for painting the yellow stripes. I'm sure it'll be challenging to get them in place correctly. This is a screen capture from the Silhouette Studio software. I think it's the largest single piece of masking material that I've used. I'll weed out what I don't need but it'll be a couple days 'til I try them. It's raining so I can't paint and I don't want to have them sitting around stuck to the model for a while.

It should be interesting.

I specifically picked a subject, and a reserve, that I considered I would be able to do with masks.  My first choice is 44-13471, 6N*J, "The Comet" of the 505th FS, 339th FG, assigned to Capt Evan M. "Johnny" Johnson.  This has a name, a nose art I felt I could draw in the Silhouette software, red/white nose checks, and best of all (for me) full D-Day stripes.

I don't intend to repeat on here all I've posted there, but thought I could expand the masking-specific bits here for anyone who's interested.

My reserve is for the event that I fail to manage the nose checks, and has just a name: 44-13708, B7*I, "Duchess of Manhattan" of the 374th FS, 361st FG, Bottisham.  I have a certain fondness for Bottisham, I may even have to invest in a second kit and do that one!

So without further ado, here we go.

Anybody with half a brain would have used an "empty" mask of the whole cross to spray a white background, then simply apply the four white L masks and spray black....voila, job done, easy peasy!  But for reasons unbeknownst to me I applied the whole mask to the wing, left the "white Ls" in place and then sprayed black.  This then entailed putting the fiddly narrow outer "Ls", four to each cross, back in place plus the large central cross, weeding out the "white section Ls" then spraying white.  The margin for error was huge, the method was stupid, but the result was gratifying!  Never again....think first!

Max

The kit was given to me by a friend a couple of years ago, and I decided to mate it up with a parts kit that another friend had sent me a few years prior to that. This latter box contained most of an entire Hasegawa Mustang kit, along with an assortment of aftermarket items and some scratch-built modifications. I decided to treat both kits as one, and use whatever aftermarket I could find in the parts box, and use it in a build of the first kit. Hopefully that makes sense! But in spirit, I wanted this to be an out-of-box build - so no rescribing!

So, I started with the Grand Phoenix resin cockpit set and instrument panel:

I modified the tail wheel and fuselage mount to allow me to fit it at the end of the build:

I used Moskit exhausts in place of the kit ones, and modified the engine so I could mount it onto a length of aluminium tubing, to assist with installing it into the fuselage:

The tubing also now forms the prop shaft.

Assembly from there was pretty straightforward:

I removed the excessive bulges from the True Details tyres:

The scheme I've chosen is "Butch Baby", which is one of the schemes Hasegawa provides in the newer of the two releases I have. This has red-and-yellow stripes on the spinner, and similarly-coloured chequers on the nose. I had a lot of trouble masking up the spinner, and I'll spare you the gory details, but I got there in the end:

This brings us up to today's update: masking the nose chequers. In preparation for this step, I scanned the kit decals, prepped them in Photoshop, traced them in Silhouette Studio, and then cut them on the Silhouette Portrait:

Note that I'll be using commercial masks for the national markings, and the kit decals for the aircraft name and any relevant stencils. If anybody wants a copy of the cut file, I can upload it here, but it's a bit wobbly in places, and probably needs to be re-drawn from scratch. I cut two copies so that I could test them on a mule, before I commit them to the final model.

I forged on ahead with the chequers, however:

SMS Red next:

And unmasked:

Not bad! But certainly not perfect. Oddly, the vinyl mask managed to lift off a divot of the yellow paint in one area, which I definitely was not expecting:

What I was expecting, however, was that the vinyl masks wouldn't conform all that well around the chin intake area, and I was right about that:

I'll re-mask this area with Tamiya tape and go over it, but since the red seems a little fragile, I'll be laying down a couple of gloss coats before I do.

Overall, it's a little untidy, but definitely in the ball park. Hopefully for the next update I'll have it all tidy and masked up ready for the main paint job.

Kev

I'm building the AlleyCat (originally Montex) Hawker Fury, a resin and white metal kit in 1/32 scale:

The full build is logged on the Large Scale Planes forum here so this will simply be the painting and masking stage.  Choice of subject was difficult but in the end I decided on 

because it was colourful and very different to the normal silver finish seen on Furies of the interwar period.  It presents quite a challenge when it comes to painting and masking, a combination of trainer yellow, Dark Earth and Dark Green camouflage and polished aluminium on the side nose panels.  The transfers supplied with the kit cover this aeroplane, K8267 but of course I decided to design and cut my own masks for most of the markings:

The transfers would be useful to scan, import into the Silhouette software and trace, similarly the colour scheme shown in the instructions gave me an idea of the camouflage pattern, though a little research caused some doubt in my mind about the scheme's accuracy:

Is there really a rectangular background behind the "7", and is there a yellow background to the wing tips?  It's always dangerous trying to interpret old black and white photos, especially this grainy, so I decided just to go with the scheme.  Yellow wing tips here I think:

Max