D-Day Stripe Dilema - Decals or Paint

It depends on how accurate you want to me, and I don't mean how straight you want the lines. D-Day stripes were a last-minute trick to foil the bad guys, and were slapped on every which way, including literally using janitorial brushes dipped in buckets of paint. They were NOT laid on neatly and evenly, though by the time you get down to 1/48 of actual size the irregularities wouldn't be that obvious. But if you're making this to look like an honest-to-goodness fighter in June 1944, I'd paint at least the edges of the stripes using a tiny brush by hand. And let your hand make mistakes.

I wouldn't worry about how the decals will look, if you use them. In the last 30 years, they have come a long, long way. Luckily!

If I was to try to mask/paint them myself they would probably look more realistic....i.e. crappy =8-)

thanks for the quick reply!!

JH

you have been assimilated. all your base belongs to us!

Tricky job indeed when you're attempting to replicate a sloppy real life paint job without attributing the subject's imperfections to one's modeling deficiencies.

In Dioramaville you can handle it quite nicely by applying a partial set of stripes and add a character with a bucket and brush slapping on the next rows. That draws attention to the figure's technique for applying the stripes and not yours. Equally, you could go the other way and support the argument for neat, regular stripes by setting up the same scene with crewman masking and airbrushing on a body shop quality stripe job. Nice little thing that a dio can do for you there, but on a stand alone static build your plane is all on its own.

I build to make myself go gee-whiz and the unknowledgable folks around here that don't have a clue about how the real stripes were applied. My preference is a neater stripe job, just not decal perfect. I paint on my stripes with an airbrush and keep them reasonably regular in pattern. I don't want anything on my build that makes it look like I'm an average builder - there's enough areas before I get to the stripes to draw attention to that sad fact! ;-)

WmB

" WmB" wrote in news:4dbIf.18333$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net:

Look at this, i found it on the web.

and IPMS Stockholm has a page to it:

I always masked and sprayed the stripes on my planes, on several decals I used the camouflage colours shone/shined/showed(?) through the decals. That's not gonna happen when you spray them on.

Unlike what the above picture shows, I like my stripes at least straight.

HTH, cheers, Dennis

Also time has some influence. The planes allready operating at D-Day had them "sloppyly" applied, while the planes that came after D-Day until they did away with the stripes would have neater stripes.