2008 Projects

[cliff strachan]

Hi Jeff,

Your Ercoupe has many points to highly recommend it. But I'm especially intrigued by your treatment of the canopy. The choice of two different shades of blue and its application I hope you deal with in more detail another time. I was hopping to try blending the surface of canopies but am very hesitant to proceed.

Cliff

[JeffH]

Thanks for your comments guys.

As for the canopies on the Ercoupe's, I painted those with a Badger 100G dual action airbrush (from Dixie Art Supplies, www.dixieart.com).  That was the first time I ever used that airbrush on a model, and am pleased with the results.  The airbrush has a built in paint cup which doesn't have a cover; I'm not used to that and ended up sloshing paint on the floor of my shop when I carelessly tilted the airbrush too far.  I guess the trick is to put only a small quantity of paint in the cup and be careful to hold the airbrush level.

The canopy areas were the last items to paint on the models-- I masked the windows off using strips of masking tape and used a cut up plastic grocery bag to mask the rest of the model.  After burnishing the tape down I applied Testor's Model Master flat insignia blue (a very dark shade of blue) around the inside edges of each window, using a very low air pressure.  After that paint dried, I used a sea blue color I had on hand (an ancient bottle of Pactra enamel) to fill in the middle portions of the window areas, again lowering the air pressure just enough so paint would flow.

Thanks again for your kind comments.