Practice Panther pt.1

On to the next thing.
Actually just another distraction to keep me away from other things.

Mini Me found these Italeri World of Tanks edition kits at the hobby shop. He got a Sherman and painted it up in a winter white wash. He wanted me to get one too, so I did. Twist my arm!!

Besides I have another project planned down the line and this would give me an opportunity to practice some things.

It's a pretty cool kit for 1/56. Not too much detail but it will work for me. The decals are all WOT themed and I think I'll save them for something else. I did like the way the tracks are in two pieces and all the wheels are one piece to make things simple.

I just put the wheels on with white glue so I could remove them later to get the tracks on. And, of course, the turret isn't glued to the hull so I still get the full rotation. The commander isn't glued in either. So next get it all primed and paint that commander.

Up to this point I was still thinking winter camo but then decided "what the heck...I'm gonna do AMBUSH!!!

So after watching a video for liquid masking I thought I would give it a shot.

Got my colors.....

Put the base coat on.....

I had this idea that I was going to liquid mask off the spots and all the yellow, go green, mask off all the green, go red, then peel off the mask. Let's see how that turned out.

Yellow

Green

 

Red

Peel off the mask....

That looks like crap. Time to strip it down and try something else. Hey! The reference page I had turns out to be the same scale as the model!!!

What if I just cut out the patterns on the picture to use as a mask? Well after cutting out the yellow and seeing how that was going to work (it wasn't going to) I scrapped the whole idea and let's do freehand!!!!

That's next in part 2.

Painting the Phantom

Actually this build has been completed and on display for a couple of weeks now so I need to finish up this posting and catch up on my new project.

This one is going to be picture heavy to get to the end.

So let's get started!

Here I've got a base coat on and filled in panel lines. This is my first real shot at panel lines to this extent. I also ran out of masking tape but came up with a brilliant idea to cover large areas...…

It's really kind of messy. Doesn't really matter, I'll get it cleaned up in a bit. Messiness came from this being a first attempt, (well I did a few practice tests on an unbuilt wing you may have seen earlier on the bench) and using the attached brush in the panel liner bottle - not a very fine tip. After all this is 1/72 scale.

See, it did clean up real nice.

Now time to decal.

Now let us look at the underside for a preview of the fun part.

You see this pylon is missing a Sidewinder. I've mounted magnets on it instead so as not to damage anything when it gets transported.

 Now let's have one last look at the pilots.

Well, two looks.
 Man, I think they look good.

Canopy on and now for the final touch:

GET IT OFF THE GROUND!!

Add  little contrast

Gotta take another look at the pilots

I got a little shaky on the canopy lines but that's okay because once it's up this is all you'll see...

Finally  one last test hanging to see it all together.

Neat to see it finally finished with the Mig. 

Looks good and everything's in balance.

Time to take it to the office.

Yay! It's Done.

What do you think?

Thanks for stopping by.