Lt. Jim Wilkin’s CORSAIR - Lipstick on a mule

[MikeMaben]

 

         OK Dad 

[Woody V]

UPDATE:
Paint mule suffers its first indignity as your ham-fisted host bravely attempts salt weathering. 

Stay tuned, I'm just getting started.

[Phil88]

Nice works on this Corsair 

[mattlow]

Just read this through from the beginning..

 

Very nice work, it's unusual to see a very meticulous out of the box build..

 

Like it a lot.

 

[Oldbaldguy]

4 hours ago, Woody V said:

UPDATE:
Paint mule suffers its first indignity as your ham-fisted host bravely attempts salt weathering. 

Stay tuned, I'm just getting started.

Acid rain!!

[chuck540z3]

Hi Woody,

 

Looking at your mule example above, was the paint sealed with a clear coat before the application of salt and paint?  If not, I would gently sand the blotches with a fine polishing cloth, then apply a thick clear coat.  This should knock down the blotchy look by at least 50%, and could look pretty darn good.

 

Cheers,

Chuck

Edited Tuesday at 03:52 AM by chuck540z3

[Woody V]

11 hours ago, chuck540z3 said:

Looking at your mule example above, was the paint sealed with a clear coat before the application of salt and paint?  If not, I would gently sand the blotches with a fine polishing cloth, then apply a thick clear coat.  This should knock down the blotchy look by at least 50%, and could look pretty darn good.

 

Chuck,

I did just that (minus the clear coat) and it was a big improvement, but the polishing part wiped out most of the salt weathering in the process. Ignore the mess on the fabric.

[Woody V]

SECOND TRY:

Pre-shading with black only on Intermediate Blue and a second attempt to portray faded fabric. 

 

For the life of me I can't get straight water to stop beading so back to the water/detergent mix which I believe had nothing to do with the salt etching the paint. This time I let the paint dry overnight.

 

Dry and ready for the diluted white (10ml thinner and six drops of white). I applied four passes of the white with a few minutes drying time between.

I didn't get a picture of salt for the black (10ml thinner and 3 drops of black). I applied 3 passes of the black.

 

The results don't seem to be worth all the aggravation, and I'm just doing this on a flat thing. Going through all this on the built model might be more work than it's worth. The following two pictures also point out the big problem with cell phones - they don't have an "M" setting to control exposure. Note the color of the green mat.

BEFORE

 

AFTER

 

I'm going to give it one more try, but on Sea Blue which is much darker.

 

SIDEBAR:
I did discover that if you put too much paint over the pre-shading you can use a fine sanding sponge to bring up more of the pre-shading. Hardly ideal, but it's an option.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 11:07 AM by Woody V

[Oldbaldguy]

Hmmmm.  I’m not sure “weathering”, especially sun bleached paint, is as random is we’d like to think.  If the airplane were always parked out in the sun, wouldn’t all the top surfaces fade pretty much the same all over and not in a random, splotchy manner?  A good understanding/working knowledge of spraying large surfaces would come in handy because you’d know where the paint might be thicker and less faded, such as at the beginning or end of a pass.  In some cases, sun damage to brushed on paint will show up weird and blotchy, but a well sprayed surface will fade pretty uniformly.  As to the fabric, you can see from most period photos that fabric surfaces appear to be a slightly different color from painted metal surfaces - that’s just the nature of the beast.   But unless it is exposed to something like POL in places, the fabric would fade as uniformly as a metal surface.  Some of the random blotchiness you see in pix is dirt and grime from constant handling and that is definitely added to the surface of the paint.  For some reason, we modelers insist on “weathering” from the metal or fabric up to the final colors, not from the surface of the color coat down as actually happens, probably because it’s easier.  Anyway, that’s my two cents’ worth and probably does not help with your dilemma one bit

[Woody V]

3 hours ago, Oldbaldguy said:

Hmmmm.  I’m not sure “weathering”, especially sun bleached paint, is as random is we’d like to think.  If the airplane were always parked out in the sun, wouldn’t all the top surfaces fade pretty much the same all over and not in a random, splotchy manner?  A good understanding/working knowledge of spraying large surfaces would come in handy because you’d know where the paint might be thicker and less faded, such as at the beginning or end of a pass.  In some cases, sun damage to brushed on paint will show up weird and blotchy, but a well sprayed surface will fade pretty uniformly.  As to the fabric, you can see from most period photos that fabric surfaces appear to be a slightly different color from painted metal surfaces - that’s just the nature of the beast.   But unless it is exposed to something like POL in places, the fabric would fade as uniformly as a metal surface.  Some of the random blotchiness you see in pix is dirt and grime from constant handling and that is definitely added to the surface of the paint.  For some reason, we modelers insist on “weathering” from the metal or fabric up to the final colors, not from the surface of the color coat down as actually happens, probably because it’s easier.  Anyway, that’s my two cents’ worth and probably does not help with your dilemma one bit

 

Those are very astute observations, very much appreciated and I agree to almost everything you said.

 

I'm hardly an expert at photo analysis and I wasn't there to see first hand but the aging that I see in pictures is more dirt, grime and spills than splotchy fading. Chipping varies but leading edges of airfoils and edges of certain areas do show paint removed down to the bare metal. As an aside, I think chipping on model airplanes is overdone too many times. However, trends in model building change and right now we're in "Splotchy Days" and when it's "properly" done it is kinda cool and impressive, plus it has the side effect of breaking up large areas of solid color. (Insert "it's supposed to be fun" here)

 

I'm aiming at these goals in this build: Restrained splotches, faded paint in areas most likely exposed to the sun, heavy dirtiness in high traffic areas like wing roots, and restrained chipping appropriately located. 

 

But of course all of this is probably beyond my pay grade and I'll wind up with something. 

 

 

[MikeMaben]

Hi Woody , re that last photo, it looks like a very dirty surface. Try a slightly darker mix of the surface color (blue)

and a slightly darker shade of the light blue on the light blue. I personally like to use pastels (chalk dust) applied

with various tools like Qtips , cotton or fabrics , paint brushes, even toothpicks depending on what you're after.

It's much more adjustable or you can eliminate it if you don't like it and start over. Just a suggestion, not trying

to get you off on a tangent. Practice practice practice

[Woody V]

3 hours ago, MikeMaben said:

Practice practice practice

 

Yea, this is turning to be nothing but.

 

Every time I get one attempt sorted out something else goes south. So far I've run five different tests on those long suffering wing mules and 800 ml of lacquer thinner used to clean my airbrush between colors. Although I swore off the idea of salt fading I'm going to try again now that I know what caused the etching. At this point, nothing is off the table, even pastels.

The whole process is tedious and somewhat exhausting but when it's finally over and the bird is painted, nobody cares what you went through to get there, the only thing that matters is the finished product. 

[Bstarr3]

This looks great, Woody! Glad you've had time to come back to it. Giving me plenty of inspiration for my own Corsair build.  My last project was the Z-M F-4 in 1/48, and although that's a very nice kit, I just can't get over how beautiful the design and engineering is on this Tamiya kit.  One of their best efforts ever!

 

FWIW, I agree that this weathering looks perhaps a bit too "splotchy", although the addition of clear coats and weathering always brings down the tonal variation evident from the airbrush layer, so sometimes if it looks "just right", it's too subtle by the time you're finished.  It's a hard thing to get dialed in, for sure - you've inspired me to practice my painting on a mule so I don't wreck this lovely kit. 

[Woody V]

Finally starting to make some progress on this on-again-off-again salt fading journey. The Sea Blue is so dark and opaque that I abandoned the pre shading idea and tried post shading by mixing a darker Sea Blue and a lighter Sea Blue and misted them on which solved the etching problem. So now that I know this works I have to be more aware of where I apply the salt so I don't wind up with such an even coverage. Getting this effect to mean something is the goal.

My biggest problem is that I just don't have enough experience so I have to gain it through these tedious experiments, but I'm getting closer.