It's looking sofa king great!
I would keep the periscope.
With the Vallejo paints you can have adhesion issues depending on the thickness of the paint, the underlying layer (plastic, resin,paint, primer, dirty or clean) or other random voodoo. When they work, they're great (and cheap!) when they fail, they really fail.
You're not wrong!! As much as I like the paint....I would have preferred using Life Color!
The Arado does look like a Viking!
Which screams "Carrier based version!!!" with folding outer wing panels
Hmmmm...stop giving me ideas!!
but you may have something there!!!
Well the major painting is now pretty much completed!
I will start by saying this is probably not what anyone was expecting for a nightfighter! But as I had mentioned that I had changed the path of this project and it’s now evolved into an all-weather fighter, hence the scheme.
Ok now the scheme….I will admit it is different but it actually based on an actual aircraft colour scheme and fits in nicely to where I am taking this project now. The scheme was originally on a Me-262 A1 of Stabsstaffel JG7. The original aircraft was part of Kommando Stamp before it was disbanded and incorporated into JG7. One aircraft in particular had this unusual diagonal colour scheme as well as the double chevron of Kommandeur, so it was possible assigned to Major Gerhard Stamp. These Me-262’s were also fitted with the WGr 21 Air to Air mortars and were tasked with attacking allied bomber formations.
So for my build/history the Me-262’s were replaced with the newer and more advanced Ar-234 P5’s in a similar role though now they could operate in all weather. The additional power of the new turbo-prop engines along with the quicker power delivery of a turbo-prop engine made them perfect for this role.
Ok the paint job, its all Vallejo paint, which I must say, was a breeze to go on, but boy is it fragile!! Compared to Life Color or Gunze/Tamiya acrylics it’ just falls off if you touch it wrong! I had heard it also can clog up the nozzle and can be a bit difficult at times, but I didn’t have any of these issues (though I did run through a wee bit of Vallejo air brush cleaning before paint job). The paint job is nice and uneven as I was aiming for, though it so does look like a model at the moment, just screaming or for some detailing and weathering!
Doing the blotches was another matter and did give me a bit of trouble, though this is the first time I have tried this with a double action airbrush, normal I would do this with my old single action one. If they annoy me too much I'll re-do them!!
The bands are not perfect and a bit blotchy, but this doesn’t matter as they will be partially covered with over spray, to reduce their visibility as seen on quite a few aircraft.
I don’t think I’ll leave the props their silver colour, I’ll probably go for something more like the colours used on prop aircraft. I’ll be much happier once a clear coat goes on to help protect to paint!
Oh and other thing is I’ll be I’ll be painting on the markings for this build, another first for me. Plus I did manage to knock off most of those fine PE bits along the way as well!