Hi
@Pete
Thank you for the kind reply. About the decal colors, well I did some research but i am far away from beeing an expert in this subject. In my opinion the Aviattic colors are a bit bright. Since those decals are semi transparent I used them always on a light-grey basecoat to make them a bit darker. But in the end thats also a bit of personal taste I think.
@Gary and Fredrik
I apprecciated your very kind comments, thank you.
Now to Part 4, Painting the fuselageBasically I used the same method to paint the lozenge of the fuselage as described before with the middlesection of the wings. That means I first made copies from two Ronny Bar profiles in the right scale and re-arranged the colors a bit, using five color pens. The sides are from different planes, but since every plane was unique handpainted it doesn't matter that much. I have no perfect original pictures of both sides of the plane that I chose to build, so no matter what I do, the pattern will be different than the original anyway...
Now I discovered that the fuselage will be a bit more complicated than wings, because the pattern has to go together all around port side-upper side-starboard side while the wings just had an upper side and a lower side. After sleeping a night over this problem I made another copy of the two fuselage sides in the right distance to another and planned the pattern between them. Again I used pens in five colors to make sure that no same colors are side by side at any point.
Then I did it exactly as with the wings, pinning holes in the lozenge-corners of the masks and transfer them with a ultra-soft pencil to the fuselage...
Masking the fuselage was again very meditative, it took the complete audio-book Lord-of-the-rings and Jules Vernes 20000-miles-under-the-ocean to paint all five colors on the fuselage.
I was very happy with the result, extremely exact shapes and no edges between the colors...so I think it was worth the effort.
Here are some pictures of those journey:
Puh...the basic colors are done
But at this stage the painting of the fuselage is just half-done. Nearly every Hannover Cl.II has the handpainted lozege oversprayed (is it any wonder why the germans needed so much time to build a plane...
)
Again I had some research to find out more of the oversprayed colors, but information was very rare. The facts I used for my color-finding were:
-On good original pictures I can see at least two different overspray colors.
-historic reports (capture reports) and statements from temporary witnesses describe the fuselage often as undefined greenish/bluish.
-the WNW manual also suggests green or blue colors for the overspray.
So my decision was to use a dark green and a medium grey-blue for the overspray.
Before spraying on the fuselage I wanted to get a feeling for the colors and the thinning again, so I sprayed the five fuselage-colors on a piece of plastic card just to get the feeling...
The thinning of the paints in this attempt was good for spraying shades, but too thin for an overspray, so I made more attempts...
This helped me to find my colors and thinning-rate for spraying the overspray, they are:
-dark green: 3x Vallejo Model Air 250, 2x Vallejo Flow Improver, 2x Tamiya X20-A, 4x Vallejo Airbrush Thinner
-greyish blue: 1x Vallejo Model Air 109, 1x Vallejo Flow Improver, 1x Tamiya X20-A, 2x Vallejo Airbrush Thinner
The three thinner-components of those mixes are mixed before adding the paint-component, to avoid clumping of the colors because of the unmixed alcohol component X20-A.
With those color-mixes I started overspraying the fuselage until I thought that it comes close to the appearing on the original pictures.
Unfortunately I forgot to make a picture of the finished overspraying, so I will show here the picture of the completed fuselage with the applied decals.
The yellow stripe on the fuselage is made with masking and the airbrush, the other markings are the excellent decals of the kit.
Thats enough for today...I hope you enjoyed this little report.
Questions, statements and comments are always welcome
Have a nice time.