My son have asked me to help him with his Mustang, and now I’ve finally got to it. I had done some painting before but wasn’t happy with it so I sanded most of it down, but then it ended up on the shelf and sat there for quite some time.
Painted red inside
Front, rear and inside of hood painted.
More red paint
Not sure how long it takes for the red to fully dry, but I’ve heard a week, so I’ll just leave it for now, then I’ll paint the topside of the body and the hood.
Now I’ve finally started to make a dio/base for my Scout car. I first made a scetch on the canvas.
Rough scetch
I then started to work with the clay I bought. Very soft to work with but crumbled easy. Using water helped a lot, and after a while I had a piece of landscape that looked like this.
Landscape made
I will let this dry and then start to paint it and add grass and small turfs. Some logs and small branches might also work. Not sure how to make vegetation as I think some bushes and leafs would look nice. I’ll figure it out!
I’ve assembled all the weapons and tanks for the Mirage.
Missiles and stuff
For some reason I can’t find anything on how to paint any of them in the instructions, and I also need to figure out the loadouts for the Argentinian AF during the Falklands conflict.
The instructions doesn’t say anything about weight or how much, so I just threw in as much as I could in the nose cone, and then glued it in place.
Nose glued in place
This kit is fighting quite a bit and there are things that could have been done better and in a slightly different way to avoid some issues. I have some steps on panels that needs to be taken care of.
On the Lightning I decided to go with an aluminium cover instead of chrome. Here the area is masked.
Area around cover masked
I think it turned out ok, but forgot to take a pic, so after a while I masked the entire bottom area, making it ready for the next step, black basing. So I painted black to cover all areas that should be painted with squiggles later.
Underside painted blackTopside painted black
As I never done black basing before, I needed something to practice on, and as the Harrier should have the same colours, I thought it would be a fitting subject.
Harrier black basing test
I sure need some practice to get the squiggles right, and I will add a few other grey nuances before I start painting the camo colours.
Normally joining the body halves should bring no bigger problems, but for some reason the halves woudn’t go together as they should in the middle of the body. After some checking I figurered that the intake seemed to be the problem. By gluing the body halves to the intake, it pulled them in, and thus created a gap in the top. As the underside is open as long as the wings are not on, it was no greater problem to loosen the sides anad then glue the seam.
Fuselage halves glued
I then glued the intake again, which as it turned out I shouldn’t have done, cause when I tried to fit the wings, it looked like this.
Quite some gap
There was quite a large gap to deal with and no matter how much I tried to press the wings closer, it wouldn’t work. I checked the net for a build review, and found one that said that I shouldn’t have glued the rear end of the intake at all. I also shouldn’t have glued teh outer intake covers until after the wings was in place. Something I’ll try to keep in mind as I have one more Kinetic Mirage kit. I cut open the intake/fuselage bond again and also added a piece of sprue to widen the fuselage a bit.
Widener added
Now the wings fit against the fuselage looked like this.
Much less gap now
I glued the wings and added a bit of plastic on each side to take away some of the gaps.
Plastic stripes added
After cutting them and filling the rest with some putty, it looked like this!
Gaps filled
I’ll sand that later and might have to fill more putty to make it look nice. The hardest will be to rescribe missing panel lines.
Next up on my work bench was the figures to the Scout car, which after some shadows and dry brushing looked like this.
Uniforms painted
Getting closed to be done! The driver still need to be painted. All black uniform doesn’t make it easier. I might also sort a base of some sort.
It doesn’t show very good, but I repainted the belly of the lightning.
Belly painted
I’ll repaint the wings as well, and then do some panels in different colours to break it up a bit.
While painting black a while ago, I also painted the hood and interior roof black on my sons Mustang.
I started this kit pre corona pre brexit. It’s been laying in the box since then. I had started with the cockpit but that’s pretty much it. I added home made seat belts.
Seat with belts added
The instructions to these kits are a bit confusing and quite sparse when it comes to colour instructions. One pic shows that the intake should be white and the other silver. I did a bit of my own interpretation, but I might abandon that and paint aluminium all over.
Intake and front wheel well painted
While painting some other stuff black, I put some on the cokpit area of the fuselage.
Some black painted
The intake parts after removing the tape.
Intake parts painted
I glued the wheel well to the cockpit tub.
Cockpit and wheel well
I used my Moltov chrome pen to paint the hub of the intake fan.
Intake hub painted chrome
The last thing I’ve done so far is to glue the small round glass piece to the sight and the sight glass. I’ll carfully paint some black around the sigth later.
Sight glass added
Forgot that I also did some painting in the wheel well to increase the interest.
Wheel well details painted
It seems like I forgot to take pics on the exhaust parts. Will sort that later.
