Rudel's Stuka

By far the most difficult model I've done up to this point with my airbrush: Rudel. I wanted to recreate the camo pattern that was on the FoW website, but the one thing I didn't like on the aircraft there was the yellow stripe on the fuselage.

Rudel's Stuka

I managed to paint up the base coat of olive drab and pale blue grey (for the underside) and applied masking tape to the areas where I didn't want the green to appear (to emulate the staggered camo pattern above). All went well with that application of green and I removed the masking tape and it came out awesome for my first attempt. What happened next made my heart sink. I had cleaned my airbrush pretty thoroughly but when I went to apply the gloss coat to the plane, a little bit of pale blue managed to mix in with the gloss (from where I have no idea) and gave the model a frosted white appearance. After staring at the debacle, I had to strip it to the resin - there was no way I was going to have that on my plane.

Cut to 5 hours later, i was able to pull all the paint off of the plane and put primer on it. I let the primer dry and applied the basecoat of olive drab for the top and pale blue grey for the underside. This time I sealed the plane (using a spray can of lacquer rather than my airbrush) prior to me applying the masking tape cutouts I made. I applied the cutouts and then laid a fine layer of camo green to the plane. After I was satisfied with the results, I carefully removed the masking tape cutouts and sealed the plane with a layer of Testors Gloss Coat.

After the decals where applied - I found that the yellow arrow was the hardest one to apply - I sealed the plane with a layer of dull coat, pin washed the plane, and this is the finished result:

Rudel's ready to fight!