SPA Modeler

The seat belts have been glued into place. I gave the seat a light gloss coat and then a dark brown wash to dirty the harnesses up and yes, the stitching did get highlighted as advertised.




One of the sub-assemblies that have been painted. They are hydraulic bottles of some sort.

That is some beautiful work John. Once again, everything looks just right.

Beautiful work, them belts just look so good and everything has just the right amount of weathering.

Thanks guys! I appreciate the check-in!

speedgraflex wrote:There is a lot of reflected sheen off the blue backing at the top of the last image you presented. Are you able to adjust lighting with some diffusion, John? With such clean imagery that technical issue just pops out at me, and I do mean the imagery is so clean and quite sharp and beautiful! Your care and attention to detail is obvious and masterful!

That sheen is caused by the reflection of the background material, which is some sort of plastic sheeting. Depending on camera position, the glare is usually at the bend in the sheeting as it goes from horizontal to vertical.


So... depending on where the subject is at, whether sitting on the background material or elevated above it, and where the camera is at, some pictures may have that glare in the background. If you see the grain of the background material in the photos, most likely you won't see the glare because of the downward perspective.

The LED bulbs on this lightbox does not allow dimming unfortunately. And I don't have the diffuser cloth mounted at the moment so maybe that would cause more glare than normal.

Thanks for suggestions, Bruce. I'll see what I can do! I could also shorten the background sheet a little bit to increase the radius of the bend... that might reduce the glare spot as well.

That bulkhead and seat are glorious.

Also- I read through what you published about there being a Dark Green and Cockpit Green combination inside the cockpit. You’re executing that very well here. Gives it that extra depth which really pushes it over the cliff for me. Very good work.

Thanks Kenny! I'm taking a very slow and methodical approach to this cockpit. I have a feeling you are going to see things differently when you get to your Birdcage and I look forward to your interpretation of this amazing cockpit.

I finally moved forward on the central cockpit piece. This contains the two side panels of the cockpit and I've laid down the base painting. The silver switches are old school enamel so I'm going to let this dry completely overnight, seal it with a gloss coat and then try to apply the Barracuda cockpit stencils. After that I can start adding the other detail bits that attach to this piece.



The tail wheel well needs to be finished before the fuselage can be closed up so I'm starting the work here. Very nice detail out of the box that I will not add to but hopefully I'll be able to highlight the detail with some careful painting and weathering. There are some ejection pin discs that need to be filled.