Progressing on the Tamiya1/48 He 219 reverse mottle

[pat d]

[Troy Smith]

looks really good, like the pics of the one at the Smithsonian... great work!

[billn53]

Impressive paint work! I’m jealous. 

[Thom216]

Jeez, my hand would be cramping up after one nacelle! Very nice and intricate work.

[Marklo]

Looks really good.  Those night fighter schemes can be so difficult, but the end result is marvellous.

[Lanmi]

Great paintwork, I love it. I wonder would it be possible in 1/72. Which airbrush and needle are you using?

[ckw]

OK I'm guessing you are using a mask to spray a light background over the solid mottle colour. Would you care to show the masking technique you are using? The mottle shapes look too "interesting" for simple blue tack blobs.

 

Thanks

 

Colin

[AdrianMF]

Looks great. It captures exactly the way the wavy lines define the blobs. And even more impressive for controlling the size and randomness as well as doing it so neatly.

 

Regards,

Adrian

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

That is remarkably good.  Superb, in fact.

[pat d]

No masking. the RLM75 gray was applied and the RLM 76 lt. blue was applied over the gray freehand with a Paasche V Jr. with the #1 tip and needle sprayed at 15 PSI spraying pressure. Testors paint was thinned 1 part paint to 1 part thinner. I use a blended thinner of 50% mineral spirits and 50% Xylene-caution Xylene REQUIRES good ventilation and I wear a mask. Xylene is pungent stuff! I basically sprayed a "fishnet" pattern  using a 1/32" line width then went over the lines to build up the colour density. It just takes time and obviously you can't do it all at once. What you see is about 8 painting sessions so far doing a bit at a time. Doing it in different paint sessions tend to change the rhythm and helps to "contrive to make something look random" I am sure there was a team of painters that painted these things so obviously there would be differences in application due to the style and taste of the painters. Here is a close up of the stab assy, and center section  during the painting process and a photo of the real thing with the photo  darkened up a bit to more clearly show the reverse mottle pattern.

Cheers!

Pat

Edited January 24, 2020 by pat d

[72modeler]

I can only imagine how bad your "trigger" finger cramped up  on your airbrush by the time you finished! Looks great! I hesitate to think how  much fun this would be in my preferred scale. Thanks for sharing your technique and paint mix with the rest of us.

Mike

[pat d]

My pleasure, Mike. Just be cautious if you use xylene. I think this scheme in 1/72 could be done using the now out of production Paasche AB turbine airbrush, an amazing tool indeed.

Best,

Pat

[Thom216]

Just begin with one line and then start making half-arcs? Looks a lot more intricate than that. Good show.

[ckw]

I'm impressed - certainly seems to produce a more authentic result than trying to spray the mottles individually. I must give this a try - I can spray a thin enough line, but not sure my hand is that steady!

 

Is the purpose of adding Xylene to your brew purely to speed up drying time, or is there another benefit (I generally use Colour Coats enamel thinned with Naptha).

 

Cheers,

 

Colin

[Grey Beema]

Very impressive.  It’s the consistency you have managed in your mottle size that gets me..

[pat d]

Colin Xylene is a slow evaporating lacquer thinner, it has a 5 times slower rate of evaporation than Toluene. It will thin the paint without breaking down the binder, pigment and vehicle The mineral spirits also slows down the dry time even more and reduces the chance of clogging on the small airbrush tips, although this still has to be done occasionally. A slower drying time is the key as it allows smaller lines and retards paint drying on the airbrush tip/needle orifice. 

I use this same thinner blend for Colorcoats ( my favorite) 

REPEATING : Xylene must be used with good ventilation. I also wear a mask.

Thom 219 I basically spray a fishnet pattern using different shapes, triangles, circles, squares, oblong and various shapes to produce a pattern that looks random.

[shortCummins]

that is mighty impressive 

 

as I struggle making random squiggles for "black basing" you can guess how impressed I am

 

rgds

John(shortCummins)

[JosephLalor]

Regarding the camouflage pattern, when Tom Cleaver was reviewing the Tamiya He 219 on Modeling Madness he said that it wasn’t a mottle but a ‘scribble’ of RLM 76 over RLM 75

[Marklo]

There are some pretty good pictures of this on a restored airframe on the internet.   It is basically a long wavy line of light gray over a dark gray base and is one of those schemes that is generally confused for spots of dark gray on a light base. I did try this scheme on a 1/72 Arado 240 but with a hairy stick, didn’t work out too bad. But nothing like the results here. 

[72modeler]

3 hours ago, pat d said:

My pleasure, Mike. Just be cautious if you use xylene. I think this scheme in 1/72 could be done using the now out of production Paasche AB turbine airbrush, an amazing tool indeed.

Best,

Pat

No problem! If xylene was good enough for the Floquil railroad and military colors, it's good enough for me- that was the chemical makeup of their original Diosol thinner, IIRC, as those paints were xylene-based lacquers. (Wanna guess who still has a ton of them?)

Mike