This
is my B-17 project. Last fall I had an opportunity to visit the
Imperial
War
Museum
in Duxford
England
and walk around their flying B-17 “Sally B” and the static B-17 they have in
the
American
Air
Museum
portion
that
is fairly “Weathered”. It
inspired me to play with weathering an olive drab B-17 (and several other kits
after this) I built the kit
straight out of the box as I was really concentrating on what I could do with
the paint and weathering. This kit has been around a hundred years so I won’t
bother with the build.
Model
Master enamel was the primary paint used. I
started with standard Olive drab lightened considerably with Khaki and sprayed
the entire plane. I then mixed a slightly darker batch of the same formula and
spayed the plane concentrating on the center areas of most of the panels.
At this point I masked off all the fabric control surfaces since most of
the color photos I have of B-17’s show these as being much lighter than the
rest of the plane.
Click on
images below to see larger images
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I then
hit the entire plane with Oil drab right out of the bottle concentrating on the
panel lines mainly but I did shade some complete panel.
From here I gradually started introducing black into the mixture making
sure the differences between shades was very subtle. In all I followed this
process about 8 times until I was satisfied with the effect.
I left the plane for about an hour to set up before starting the exhaust
stains top and bottom. For this I used Floquil dirty black with the air brush.
This mixture makes a perfect shade of grimy exhaust.
I finished it up with some light tan streaks (very lightly) around two of
the engine cowlings only (outer star board and inner port).
I finished with the paint by mixing some dark olive drab and brush
painted some random patch repairs on some of the fabric control surfaces and a
lighter mixture for the metal areas. A
little chipping with some silver it was ready for a coat of Future and some
decals (again straight from the kit). I then sprayed the entire plane with
Humbrol Matt Varnish and it was ready for the standard oil wash using Burnt
Umber.
Ron
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