Grand Messerschmitt project: Canopies & wheel wells

We are down to all kinds of detail painting now… this time, it is canopy frames and wheel wells.

Normally I used a “phased” approach to painting canopy frames: first mask the latitudinal frames and paint them, then the longitudinal ones, finally any other remaining parts. This generally works well and saves me a lot of stress at the cost of just cleaning my airbrush a few more times. This time, however, I decided to do something different. I scanned the clear canopy part and used the resulting image as a guide to draw a mask. I then used my Cricut cutter to cut the mask from Tamiya masking tape. The results are surprisingly good.

Grand Messerschmitt project: Camouflage

The project has finally progressed to a point where I could start airbrushing actual camouflage. For paints I chose Tamiya acrylics and Mr. Color lacquers. Normally I paint everything with Tamiya, but in this project I am experimenting with Mr. Color, and so far the results have been absolutely excellent (albeit a bit stinky).

Here is what I have used:

Color	FS.595	Paint
Finnish field green (olive green)	x4096	Tamiya XF-61
Finnish black		Tamiya XF-1
RLM 65 Hellblau (Finnish “DN-väri”)	x5414	Tamiya XF-23
RLM 74 Graugrün	x6081*	Tamiya XF-24
RLM 75 Grauviolett	x6173	Mr. Color #37
RLM 76 Lichtblau	x5622	Mr. Color #117
RLM 71 Dunkelgrün	x4079	Mr. Color #17

* Tamiya XF-24 or Tamiya XF-63? I think the appearance of the latter is just too dark for this small scale.