Clostermann's LO-D by Airfix, Spitfire LF Mk.IXc - Completed

[Dpgsbody55]

On 5/3/2024 at 2:29 AM, mozart said:

Well done Michael, that’s an unexpected bonus but for goodness sake don’t push it too hard, tempting as it is, then set yourself back even further. 

 

Thanks.  I definitely won't be pushing hard.  Any set back will be a real curse, particularly as I should be in New Zealand right now visiting my son who's wife is about to give birth to our second grand child.  We've pushed that back to mid June which has been a pain and don't want to have to do so again, if indeed we can.

 

As to the Spitfire, I've finally finished masking and sorted out the casting line in the canopy, then masked that off.  Today I should start painting and I'm hoping by Monday to have got the stripes done as well as the leading edge recognition stripe.  Digits would be all crossed, but that's a bit painful right now.

 

 

 

Cheers,

Michael

Edited May 4, 2024 by Dpgsbody55

[Dpgsbody55]

Painting has now begun, as has an awful amount of masking.  I'm starting the paint process by painting all the stripes first, starting with the white parts of the D-Day stripes.

 

I masked off the outer edges of the stripe areas first, after having stuffed sponge into the radiators and wheel wells.  I taped the two parts of the gear covers together and placed them over the wells which will be painted in the underside colour later.  Here we see the white painted fuselage and the about to be painted wings.

 

 

Wings painted white now too.  This took a while as I used the wrong airbrush with a 0.2mm needle.  For this type of work, I find a 0.5mm needle works best, but in my haste, I picked up the wrong airbrush and decided to keep going rather than have to clean two airbrushes.  But my wrist was a bit sore afterwards.

 

 

Next day, I masked up to paint the black portions, with the right airbrush this time.

 

 

Done.  And a lot faster than the white part....    I've used Mr Color acrylic flat white and flat black so far.

 

 

After another twenty four hours, the black parts were covered up, then the wing leading edges were masked before painting in Tamiya XF3 enamel yellow.  I hate yellow.  I doesn't cover so this is after about five coats.  I thought enamel might cover better than acrylic, but I may have been wrong here.  And why is yellow the hardest colour to clean when you have to clean out your airbrush??   Of the three colours painted so far, black has been the easiest to clean out of my airbrush.

 

 

You can barely see it in the above picture, but I've also masked off the machine gun apertures with Tamiya 6mm tape, cut to the length of the red patches that covered the gun barrels before firing.  I may paint these brick red later and poke a hole in each, or try replacing the tape with cigarette paper, cut to shape.  I'll decide on that later.

 

So for my next step, I'll mask over the yellow painted area, cut out the masked wheel wells, add the remaining aerials and pitot, then paint the undersides followed by the top surface camo and unmask everything except the cockpit.  But looking at it right now, it's about half painted now.   At the beginning of this build, I said I don't like doing models with D-Day stripes, and after spending many hours masking, with a barely functioning wrist admittedly, I'm reminded of why I harbour this dislike.

 

 

Cheers,

Michael

[mozart]

Hard work doing all that masking Michael, so annoying that it takes forever to put in place accurately and the airbrushing is done in a trice!  All worthwhile in the end though when the magical time of taking the masking off arrives....as long as there are no bleeds!!

 

I'm going to use pencil line guides then paint my D-Day stripes by hand probably using water-based paints because I want it to look as though the stripes have been roughly applied "in the field".....and it saves a lot of tedious masking!! 

Edited May 7, 2024 by mozart

[MikeMaben]

On 5/6/2024 at 11:58 PM, Dpgsbody55 said:

      Painting has now begun, as has an awful amount of masking.  But my wrist was a bit sore afterwards.

The pain that must be endured when creating a masterpiece Michael  .

[Shoggz]

Really enjoying this build and glad you were able to get it going again Michael.

 

I share your pain on the yellow paint front.. I tend to lay down a coat of matt white first and the yellow seems to go on much better.. (Doesn't help with cleaning the airbrush though!)

[mozart]

1 hour ago, Shoggz said:

Really enjoying this build and glad you were able to get it going again Michael.

 

I share your pain on the yellow paint front.. I tend to lay down a coat of matt white first and the yellow seems to go on much better.. (Doesn't help with cleaning the airbrush though!)

Yep, yellow definitely needs a white base not only for easier coverage, but also to get a "truer" yellow hue.  Ask me how I know:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Dpgsbody55]

On 5/7/2024 at 11:31 PM, mozart said:

Hard work doing all that masking Michael, so annoying that it takes forever to put in place accurately and the airbrushing is done in a trice!  All worthwhile in the end though when the magical time of taking the masking off arrives....as long as there are no bleeds!!

 

I'm going to use pencil line guides then paint my D-Day stripes by hand probably using water-based paints because I want it to look as though the stripes have been roughly applied "in the field".....and it saves a lot of tedious masking!! 

 

I had thought of doing something very similar, but my reasoning was that any rough hand painting reduced to 1/24 scale would not really show up well.  If you look at Furie's pictures on the first page of this WIP, the bands look reasonably well done, if a little worn and not consistent in their placement.  LO-C has the bands further forward on the fuselage and further outboard on the wings in comparison to LO-D.  The down side to this is the amount of time (and tape) I've spent masking.  Hoping it will be worth it on Reveal Day .

 

On 5/8/2024 at 3:30 PM, MikeMaben said:

The pain that must be endured when creating a masterpiece Michael  .

 

Are you referring to artist's angst or the pain in my wrist? 

 

On 5/8/2024 at 8:07 PM, Shoggz said:

Really enjoying this build and glad you were able to get it going again Michael.

 

I share your pain on the yellow paint front.. I tend to lay down a coat of matt white first and the yellow seems to go on much better.. (Doesn't help with cleaning the airbrush though!)

 

I'm definitely going to have to remember that trick, especially as I suspect the tape will remove some yellow paint.

 

On 5/8/2024 at 9:23 PM, mozart said:

Yep, yellow definitely needs a white base not only for easier coverage, but also to get a "truer" yellow hue.  Ask me how I know:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That looks very well applied and I'm guessing you've used less paint in using a white base coat.  Nice model.

 

At the moment, my Spitfire is awaiting the last of the camo colours.  I had a problem with the Tamiya light sea grey I was going to use going gritty and blobby as it came out of the airbrush, so I spent over half an hour cleaning that and removing it from the model.  Thankfully, I found some old Model Master LSG that went on just fine.  I've used Tamiya dark sea grey on top and am about to start on the RAF dark green.  After more masking... 

 

Reveal Day should be soon.

 

 

Cheers,

Michael

[dennismcc]

Just read this from the begining and what a great source of practical information on building what looks like a great kit, it brought back many memories of building models in Thailand and Australia as well.

Looking forward to more progress, wrist allowing that is, I hope that it is getting better for you.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

[MikeMaben]

22 hours ago, Dpgsbody55 said:

                          Are you referring to artist's angst or the pain in my wrist? 

It's all part of the process ... as you know 

[Dpgsbody55]

On 5/11/2024 at 6:21 PM, dennismcc said:

Just read this from the begining and what a great source of practical information on building what looks like a great kit, it brought back many memories of building models in Thailand and Australia as well.

Looking forward to more progress, wrist allowing that is, I hope that it is getting better for you.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

 

Glad you're enjoying it.  I hope you can put it to uses one day.  It's a very good kit, especially for the money.

 

 

Cheers,

Michael

[Dpgsbody55]

Today is Reveal Day.  At least, that's how it feels after spending ages removing a large amount of masking.  The model got more after the last update.  BTW, I raided my nearest hobby shop today to re-stock my tape supplies....    That shop is near my chiropractor who also got paid by me today..... 

 

After all the D-Day stripes and leading edge yellow stripes were masked off,  my next step was to paint the camo.  My usual method is to paint the undersides first, followed by the top surfaces.  So the undersides received a coat of light sea grey after having removed the masking over the wheel wells.  In this case, I used my old Model Master enamel supplies, as my (newer) Tamiya acrylic had gone off and blocked up my airbrush, as related above.  Personally, I much prefer enamel paints as they cover better and seem to have less problems than acrylic paints.  But I'm having difficulty finding any enamels these days and MM enamel colours seem to be unobtainium.  Here's the painted underside, though you'll have to squint to see the paint against the plastic.

 

 

More masking was needed to cover up the lower parts  before painting Tamiya dark sea grey.  I'm just roughing out the camo pattern here using the lighter colour, so it looks very rubbish.  I allow 24 hours between applying each colour to make sure it's set and I can apply tape to it if I need to.

 

 

I use grease proof paper cut to pattern as a mask for the last colour.  Grease proof paper is sufficiently non-porous to prevent the next colour soaking through and translucent to help with drawing the final camouflage pattern.  Then you have to lay it on which can be tricky and sometimes needs multiple parts, and in some areas I need to form double sided tape to help longer edges stay in place.  A little time consuming, but not so much so on this model as so much of it is covered with stripes.  However, I used tape for the top of the right side of the fin and rudder and also for that small area on the right side of the engine cowling at the front.

 

 

And again, after paint.  This was Sunday night.

 

 

So today was mask removal, which took ages, but here's the result.

 

 

 

Overall, I'm quite happy with it, but there's lots of little bleeders, mostly where the black parts of the stripes have bled through.  So my next step will be to touch up these and while I do so, I'll have to have a think about the plane's serial number.

 

Normally, the aircraft serial would be placed slightly forward and over the sky fuselage band, but the white portion of the D-Day stripe has been applied over that band.  I can't find any pictures of this plane before the D-Day stripes were removed from the top surfaces so I don't know if that part of the fuselage was not striped.  Some were applied temporarily obliterating the aircraft serial, and some had the stripes painted above and below the serial, leaving it visible.  I have no idea which is correct for this plane, so if anyone can throw some light on this in the next few days, I'd appreciate it.  I do know that LO-C displayed that aircraft serial, but that was striped differently to LO-D, so no consistency even within the squadron.  To add to this, and as explained on the first page of this WIP, the profiles showing this plane with the upper surface D-Day stripes removed and claiming it to be Clostermann's plane are factually wrong as he left 602 squadron before this occurred.  Any flight undertaken by this plane without top surface stripes were by Jacques Remlinger who "inherited" the plane at this point.

 

So that's me for the next few days.  If I go with a visible serial number, more masking will be needed.  Oh rapture.  Oh frabjous joy... 

 

 

Cheers,

Michael

Edited May 13, 2024 by Dpgsbody55

[dennismcc]

Looking good, I love the moment when you start removing masking, but I hate it when it all goes wrong, which luckily does not happen often or require much repair work.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

[MikeMaben]

Looks fine Mike 

[mozart]

Turned out very well from what I can see Michael, super job so far. I was reading something the other day about Typhoons which stated that once planes started operating from bases in France (not sure how soon after D-day that was), the stripes on the upper wings were painted over because it made them too conspicuous on the ground for German attackers. Could be relevant for your Clostermann time frame? 
 

Edited May 14, 2024 by mozart

[Furie]

Very nice work Michael, the end result will be splendid!
Here's a link to a Clostermann Spit au/48 with the same camouflage as yours.
The person who assembled it is really very experienced and writes articles in a French aircraft model magazine.

 

Maybe this will help you?

 

[GB EDUARD] 1/48 - Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX - "Clostermann" (forumactif.com)

Edited May 14, 2024 by Furie