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Welcome Everyone, thanks for flying by this build! Tamiya's 1/32 F-16C, this one's been done for over a month now but I didn't have the presentation and the stand the way I wanted it. I think it's ready for display now though(although as soon as I looked at closeups around the cockpit I see I have some touch-up to do LOL). I wanted to represent a picture I found on AirWingSpotter with the plane going vertical and vapor contrails billowing off the wing roots so for that I used medical rayon rope(basically just cotton balls in a rope form). I cut the arm from the Tamiya kit in half and turned it around to go vertical. I chose to do Lt. Col. Mike Chandler's bird from the 2004 show season. I was lucky enough to find a walk-around of his #1 and so i tried to represent it as best I could. This is an out of the box build except for 2 extras that I thought were crucial; the American Flag and the stopwatch in the cockpit. I preshaded with grey and dark grey panel line accent so that the lines would be crisp, without an surrounding shadow, to represent a show bird. I used MCW paints for all the gloss work and Vallejo for the cockpit and the exhaust nozzle. All of the striping is done via airbrush and the rest is with the kit decals. One of the unique things I did for this was to paint the engine internals to represent full afterburner. The way I have the plane oriented I guess I'll need some mirrors to see that now haha! I've included a picture below taken on a horizontal stand so you can see how it turned out. Let me know what you think as I may try this again and would like some feedback on it. You can check out my WIP for more details http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=72439&hl=thunderbird

I need some expert advice on what order of operations to use here. I'm working on the thunderbird graphic and all the blue. I have the model primered. I question the approach because I'd like to minimize the number of layers of paint but then i wonder if I'll have problems with the line between the colors if I don't do one all-over color first. Let me know what your experience has been ? Should I paint all the white and then put on the masks and do the blue, Paint the blue in ageneral area and then mask it and try to come ver the blue, Put the masks on the area that will be blue, paint the white and then reverse the process to do the blue, Or some other way to go about it?