Electric Indigo

I'm squeezing a little bit of painting time out of the rare sunshine. Underside in progress, panel by panel. Tamiya Sky Grey and Gloss White in a 1:1 mix over Dark Sea Grey.

Thank you for the comprehensive explanation and the link! Very tedious process, but the results are awesome.

Mainly, what the painting process is like, e.g. do you use different shades of the main color, or apply a uniform coat and then add oil filters? TIA.

Great cockpit, and I love the textures. Would you mind to share your approach here?

Just spectacular in every aspect! Congratulations on this masterpiece. What's the size of the kit?

Great care of details on this small kit, and the finish is flawless. But wasn't the He-162 a "Salamander"?

The forward windows were slightly tinted from the inside with a mix of Tamiya gloss and transparent blue. You need to apply a wet coating, otherwise the part starts to look frosted. I don't know if the windows are actually tinted on the Intruder or if this is an effect of the thick glass parts. To mask the various curves, I cut the segments with the help of a drafting tool. Black, Dark Sea Grey and the final color were applied. Gift unwrapping moment. And a little temporary assembly for self-motivation.

Great work on the details, and the colors look more in harmony than on the real thing! The weathering is excellent, it's very difficult to manage a consistent appearance over the complex, high-contrast splinter scheme.

Quite an impressive beast! Great job on the finish, and the base looks cool, too, is that from Uschi? I guess a Su-25 is next?

The model has been primed with Tamiya XF-54 Dark Sea Grey, and the main course begins. The color was mixed as a personal interpretation of reference photos. The paint is thinned 1:1 and applied panel by panel in a loose wiggle pattern. The semi-gloss over the flat primer provides nice specular highlights.

Beautiful heavy weathering without overdoing it. And you don't see this scheme too often.

Outstanding work on even the tiniest details, and the paintjob is a work of art. The decals could use another layer of filth to tie them into the weathering IMO. It must have taken a lot of stamina to finish this kit on this level.

The finish looks great and I lilke your balanced weathering.

The Hobby Boss A-6E Intruder is no stranger around here, and various inspiring builds have finally pushed me to start a second attempt on this aircraft after a too short fling with a Hasegawa kit in my childhood days. IMO the (street) price to quality ratio of the Hobby Boss kit is hard to beat; it has been thoroughly commented on, so I will try not to babble and only highlight some selected aspects of the build. The only extras I plan to add are the pilots. Since I almost exclusively build my planes gear up, I have a constant need for personnel. I made molds of some Hasegawa and Tamiya pilots and now have a clone army at my disposal. Regarding the construction, I followed the advice to glue the radome halves to the fuselage halves to have a proper fit at this critical seam. I also left off the coaming when installing the cockpit, as it would go between the fuselage halves, resulting in a too wide body when you put on the canopy. The overall fit of the kit is quilte good, but of course the gear up mode comes with some punishment. I was able to carefully cut the front MLG doors to fit them into the openings, but still there were a lot of gaps to close. Even more putty action after installing the intakes. The instructions don't seem to mention that you can use the included spars to join the wings. And so it's starting to look like an Intruder.

It's not a bug, it's a feature... The filming miniature had the screws, and instead of risking the ire of the fans with an alternative approach, Round 2 replicated the original "engineering".

Another classic to cross off the list.

From Airfix' Workbench blog/Scale Model World

The colors & the presentation are just beautiful. Great work!

Very unique airframe, looks like a mighty impressive kit. Do you have another 1/48 kit to put next to it for size?

Very nice finish, and the pilot makes it speceial. It is ridiculous how tiny the canopy of the vintage A-4 is, compared to the M. And for inspired fellow modelers – put the pilot in the tub before you glue the fuselage together...

The Eduard kit is so good, and you really did it justice. The colors look great. For me, it was a standoff between the Finnish, Cuban and Croatian scheme, and Croatia won.

Good luck cutting out the windows...😅

Closeup

In my eyes, the WZ-10 belongs in the top ten of Science Fiction looking hardware. This is the new Trumpeter 1/48 kit; the quality is overall excellent with an abundance of surface details and good fit. What started as straightforward OOB build got a bit bogged down when I stumbled upon a thread on SinoDefenceForum with an abundance of high resolution photos from every angle. In the end, I added only tiny details: Brake lines for the front legs, support struts for the wire cutters and the antenna along the spine. The rest of the detail work was all about painting & decal placement (the instructions are somewhat vague here). Some details were added in the cockpit, including pilots carved from Hasegawa Navy drivers. The main rotor head is slightly inaccurate, but once treated with painted details and a wash looks convincing enough. I think it is a french desing, so there might actually be aftermarket parts for it. The mechanism of the tail rotor is a simple disc, and I cut it into kind of an X-shape to bring it closer to the real thing. Paints are custom mixed Tamiya acrylics over a black base coat and Vallejo Metal Color. Thanks for watching & all the inspiration.

This is amazing on so many levels! I would love to see the raw kit. Your paint & weathering work is outstanding.