Okay, next stage of work on this one:
First stage of the wood effect is to paint on a base coat of matt ochre
This was put away to dry for a couple of days so have now put on the artist oil (burnt umber) and then 'drawn' out with stiff brush to hopefully get a wood tone look. This will now need to dry for between 24-48 hours or so before next stage
I also started work on the kit prop. Painted as above but then hand painted with fine brush (biege paint) to simulate the laminated wood look.
Unfortunately, the picture is out of focus but you get the idea. I added on the same oil paint once this had dried and really drew the paint out as I only wanted a get a faint grained wood look otherwise you would not see the laminate effect.
In between all this, I started work on the fin and rudder. I removed from sprue and cleaned up the seams. I then base coated in white and gloss painted in clear in readiness for the supplied decal. I could tell looking at the decal sheet these look 'hard' printed on the sheet so carefully placed the decal in dish of shallow, warm water. All seemed to be going well until I slid (carefully) the decal from the backing paper onto model surface. As soon as I stared to slide the decal frome the paper the decal broke apart. I tried to assemble the broken decal jigsaw like but quite a bit of the design has completely disintigrated as shown
This is a big problem here as it is easy to hand paint in the overall red colour, but there is an image of a crown over a shield motif that would be tricky to repair. I have no spares to use so I was forced to make the best of what I had. I sealed in the decal (broken) using a couple of coats of clear matt. When this dried, I first painted in the overall red for red/white background band. This was fairly straightforward. However, the crown and shield emblem in the centre proved more difficult. Using very fine brushes, I touched in the red on the shield. I followed up with another equally fine brush using yellow and free hand painted in as best as I could to complete the missing sections of the crown. This took several attempts to get right. I accept this is not ideal and far from perfect, but is better than nothing. Luckily, the markings on this kit are fairly basic apart from this one part.
After painting in:
Hopefully, from a distance and in this scale I will get away with this repair.
Just waiting for the artist oils to dry before moving on further.
Regards
Dave
