I am trying to paint my 1/48 scale F-117. The large surfaces are creating problems for me. I am using a badger 200 airbrush, and I have noticed the large surface areas that I have painted have spray lines. What is the proper technique when paint surface areas?
Any sites anyone has bookmarked away that can give me a better understanding of painting scale models in general?
A larger nozzle - 0.4 or 0.6 mm - and a criss-cross pattern.
I'd suggest a wider spray pattern to speed things up, but mainly just keep adding layers of paint and building up the colour density until you get a uniform surface, if that's what you want. Resist the temptation to flood the paint on; the way you are doing it, while slow, will give a nice thin coating. Above all, keep practising!
Chek
I use a Badger 200, but I actually painted my Monogram F-117 with a rattle can of flat black and it turned out fine. You could do that for a base coat, and then use your airbrush to highlight.
But what you're really seeing is the fact that you're not making smooth, parallel strokes, and that the strokes are a bit far apart - not overlaping enough - to form uniform coverage. Practice is the only solution here. You may also need to adjust your spray width; go wider.
Also make sure your paint is thin enough - consistancy of milk is the gouge. And have enough light in the area to see your coverage.
You'll get the hang of it.
General rule of thumb for opaque colors is to overlap the previous pass by 1/3 to 1/2. HOWEVER, for future reference, if you shoot a colored clear on anything, DO NOT OVERLAP!! If you overlap with a colored clear you'll get the same effect you're getting now. Over the last thirty years I've painted candy colors on a few(?) cars, bikes, helmets, and even a jetski and snowmo for good measure, and I still screw that up from time to time. I had one girl watching me paint her Jeep and I ended up with stripes, but she didn't know I'd hosed it, liked the effect, so I left it (saved me a lot of work taking it all back off!)
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