Spitfire

This build started as a plan of experimenting with some techniques. So I bought a cheap Revell kit, which I could possibly ruin and not worry too much about.

What I wanted to test:

- Different panel-liners: oil-paint + white spirit v/s soft pastels + water.
- Different varnishes: Tamiya X-22 clear v/s Pledge floor wax (and how they work in combinations with panel-liners).
- Camouflage painting (I hadn't really done one before).

It was supposed to be more of a throwaway build, but I fell in love midway through, and ended up spending quite a bit of time on it. I did leave out some work: built a closed cockpit, painted in single color, as one can't really see much through the glass anyway; built the landing gear up.

It was a new tool (2016), so it had fine panel lines, which suited my needs.

I started painting with a green color. Then applied masking tape all over the plane, drew camouflage pattern on it with a pencil and cut along the lines with hobby knife. Then I started painting with gray color over it and realized that it's lighter than the green (I had assumed the opposite). So it took many-many layers to fully cover the underlying color. A side-effect of all these layers was that a thick wall of color formed along the edges of the masking tape. Also the paint layer ended up so thick that it filled up lots of these fine panel lines. Another lesson learnt.

To compare varnishes, I covered half the plane with Pledge and another half with X-22. I was pleasantly surprised how well the Pledge worked - it created a really thin layer and it was so much easier to work with than the X-22 varnish.

I then applied both panel-liners to both varnishes. I saw no real difference in regards to varnishes, only that with Pledge I had managed to create thinner layer of varnish, so the thin panel lines had more chance of being preserved. The soft-pastels-based panel-liner worked, but I liked more the result I got with oil-paint-based one. Previously I had had troubles with panel-liner made from oil+turpentine, which resulted in solving away the underlying varnish and paint layers. Perhaps my varnish-layers were better this time, or white spirit was less aggressive than turpentine, but I was able to remove the excess panel-liner afterwards with ease and without destroying any other paint job.