Painting Black Mike's heatshield (or any other Phantom?)

[mouse808]

Ok I've just bought the rest of AK xtreme metals colours in an attempt to do this justice.
Am I on the wrong path, any tips for getting this look?

 

Many thanks

Lee

[iainpeden]

Whenever I paint those areas on an F-4 I brush paint and start with a tin of silver, one of black, one of brown and one of blue  and mix colours. Just remember that Black Mike is now clean and most of that area would be very mucky in service - best reproduced by running a lit candle (carefully) up and down for the sooty effect.

[Duncan B]

The base of the hook was never that clean in service, always a mucky black. The way I do them is to start off with a base coat of silver as a base for the work to come (I use decanted Tamiya AS-12 as it's a tough lacquer) and then start adding the colours from the next lightest to darkest, masking off the panels I want to stay lighter than the next layer as I go. Study photos to get an idea in your head of how you want to go but honestly in 1/72 on a Phantom those big panels are just varying degrees of black with metallics showing through. AK XM paints are really simple to spray so you can feather darker shades onto lighter ones and you can also mix them to get the colour you want.

 

It's not Black Mike but it is a 1/72 scale Phantom (and the photo of the real thing shows how dark they got)

 

It's not a great photo but it hopefully it helps

 

I hope that helps

Duncan B

 

[mouse808]

Oh wow! Thanks for the tips/photos.

[71chally]

I do what Ian had mentioned, various metallic paints and black, but I also add finely powdered pencil graphite into the wet paint and it seems to give the right appearance.  Mine are brush painted mind.