Excellent work -
Really impressed by the brush/hand painted lozenge fabric on the Airfix Albatros - must have taken ages to paint!
Dave
Hi, Dave,
Thanks very much. It
did take a while! Many years ago, an Airfix magazine printed a set of templates that provided the
chordwise lines and the spacing for the lozenge. The idea was that you pasted the page onto cardboard, then cut out the chordwise line templates. Having painted the lightest colour over the wings and tail, you then laboriously placed each repeating template (there were five of them, applied as "1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5, and so on, left to right) across the wing and ran a sharp pencil down each one. When done, you'd have a bunch of regularly spaced jagged chordwise lines over the entire wing. Then you went back along each line and drew in the
spanwise lines that joined them, thus defining each lozenge. Still with me?
Then you mixed each of the remaining four colours and painted them in to their respective pencilled-in lozenge, much like a "paint-by-numbers" project. By the time I'd finished, there were/are over 2000 individual lozenges on the model. That why I was ecstatic (
) when, just six weeks later, MicroScale brought out the first 1/72nd scale
lozenge decals!
As an aside, the loz colours were the best approximation available at the time. I keep the Albi with me to remind me (as if I really
need reminding!) of just how far this hobby has moved in the last 30-odd years. Hope this explains the process clearlishy!