SPA Modeler

Thank you Carlos!

A little more painting progress (and setbacks) on the Hien. The yellow ID strip on the leading edge of the wing was masked and painted. I used a 3:1 mix of Tamiya Yellow (X-8) and Orange (X-6) for this color.



The partial tail unit marking of 56th Sentai was also painted in yellow at this time. At some point it time, this bird was transferred to the 55th Sentai and received new tail markings.



The red four-pointed star over the wing cannon openings were painted. You can also see the hairspray chipping that I did on the yellow panel.


Paint lift reared its ugly head on the starboard yellow panel. Urgh... hard to fix in such a small area and I'll lose some paint chipping too.

Stikpusher wrote: ↑Fri Jul 21, 2023 1:21 pm Looking sharp John! I like how your gave the doped fabric control areas a different shade of green.

Yea. What he said

Ouch! Yeah that's quite a bit too much pulled back on the yellow leading edge. Then again you could leave it as is as a major chipping edge. I don't know. Thoughts?

Thanks guys! Some more painting on the Hien. I did the wing stencils in red...



The wing hinomarus were next.


For primary colors like red, yellow and blue, I like to put down a base coat of white first. I keep it uneven to provide some tonal variation.


For the red color, I am using Mr Color IJN Aircraft Marking Red, C-385.



I've repaired the paint lift on the starboard wing leading edge. Some chipping was added using a sponge.

time consuming work to do all that masking, mixing, airbrushing, and cleaning, but the efforts sure pay off in the end John. More fabulous work.

Very nice!

Nice recovery!

The sprayed on markings are great. Nice recovery on the leading edge chipping

Stencils are so much better than decals. Excellent work.

Thanks guys!

Plodding onward with this... masking and painting the 55th Sentai tail markings. Very fiddly to work these types of thin borders. It's one of the reasons for leaving off the horizontal stabilizers. The vertical component of the stabilizers still bends the mask so that some distortion is unavoidable. The blue is a 4:1 mixture of Tamiya Sky Blue X-14 and Blue X-4.


A pretty ragged result. I was close to wiping this off and re-grouping but I decided to see if I could touch it up. So I sprayed it with a gloss coat and sat on it for a while.


In the meantime, I painted the fuselage hinomarus.



Over the next couple of days, I touched up the Sentai marking, primarily by carefully masking and spraying ultra small portions of corrective paint with the airbrush. It's far from perfect but I think I'm going to accept it and move forward.