Tamiya F-16 Fighting Falcon 1/72. Part 4 - Engine nozzle

 


As I understood from different WIPs and YouTube videos there are 3 main parts of aircraft fighter modeling: cockpit, paint job and engine nozzle. The painting of the latter I will show here. My journey started with a fail. First I painted the nozzle in steel color, then applied liquid mask between the blades and painted burnt iron. But after removing the mask I saw that the edges of the blades were uneven and dirty. So it didn't work out. I also tried to cut the mask tape directly on the part, but couldn't manage clean edges also. As the result - removing the paint and starting all over again.


Luckily I have a fiber laser cutter which I used to cut the stencil out of piece of steel sheet. Which in turn I used to cut the masks. (Yes there are more convenient tools for it, but this is what I have)


Then I primed the nozzle with black primer and microfiller from AK. And painted with Tamiya acrilyc Gun Metal according to the manual.


As I don't have exact metalic paint as on reference photo. I think it looks like copper or a bit burned steel. Different reference photos show different shades. I decided to put a layer of Clear Orange from Tamiya but it turned out too bright and saturate. To fade the saturation I put a light layer of Tamiya Smoke. But didn't help much. (Yes, you should consider that I'm quite a novice in modeling and this is my first jet fighter model. Yes, excuses. Again). As a last resort I put a layer of matt varnish from Mr.Color. So here is the result. Still way too bright and goldish. But at that moment I was tired and demotivated to continue finding the right shade.


And then, after several days, it hit me "eureka!" I have Tamiya weathering master sets of different metallics. And Copper (as I mentioned as the closest color) fit the best. Here you can see the final result! I'm very happy!


Thank you for reading until this point and stay tuned!

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