SPA Modeler

Ok....so THAT'S how you do your pastel washes. Great tutorial and duly noted. I use pastels alot on my builds but have used them for dingying things up more than I have for a wash. I'll be using this technique on my 262. Thanks for the info and this technique looks fabulous on your build.

How and what do you wipe away excess excess wash? Dry cloth? Moist cloth? How long do you let it sit before wiping it away?

The beauty of Flory washes is it comes off with a water damped paper towel.

BlackSheep214 wrote:How and what do you wipe away excess excess wash? Dry cloth? Moist cloth? How long do you let it sit before wiping it away?

I use a moist cloth to wipe it off. I used to use regular paper towels but due to the shedding of lint and fibers onto the model, I now have a pack of non-woven lint-free laboratory wipes that I picked up that I picked up from Amazon. The wash is water-based so you could leave it on indefinitely and still wipe it off with no ill effects. For best retention of the pastels in the details, it is best to wait for the wash to dry completely, which only takes a few minutes and is easy to see because it dries with a flat finish.

keavdog wrote:The beauty of Flory washes is it comes off with a water damped paper towel.

Yes, mine too. From his description of being reconstituted with water, I'm guessing that the Flory wash is simply a commercially-packaged version of what I use: pigments suspended in water. I picked up this idea years ago when I used to read modeling magazines and have never found the need to buy washes since this works so well.

The remainder of the wash has been done.

Some of the external bits temporarily placed using bits of Blue Tack...

The wash really makes all the detail pop! As for Flory wash the bottle says they are clay based but once I run out I won't be buying anymore but using pastels like this.

Looks great, John. I keep looking at the wear on those drop tanks and it does not look like what I have seen. Paint always wears most on leading edges with sharp radii, I think it is because there is no bow wave as there is on blunter surfaces. So I would expect to see wear on the nose and the engine inlets before the drop tanks. I learned that the hard way flying through some heavy rain in a Beech Travel Air many years ago. Many business jets such as the Lears with their pointed noses have a plastic cap over the paint on the nose cone to prevent erosion. That wasn't necessary on the fat nose of the Citations.

I wonder if the fuel tank wear was due to proximity to the nose wheel, and stuff thrown up off of wet runways. Since the photos show the tanks, but no other equal such abrasion wear on the aircraft.

Floki wrote:The wash really makes all the detail pop! As for Flory wash the bottle says they are clay based but once I run out I won't be buying anymore but using pastels like this.

Save the bottles and use them to store your own mixes!

jeaton01 wrote:Looks great, John. I keep looking at the wear on those drop tanks and it does not look like what I have seen. Paint always wears most on leading edges with sharp radii, I think it is because there is no bow wave as there is on blunter surfaces. So I would expect to see wear on the nose and the engine inlets before the drop tanks. I learned that the hard way flying through some heavy rain in a Beech Travel Air many years ago. Many business jets such as the Lears with their pointed noses have a plastic cap over the paint on the nose cone to prevent erosion. That wasn't necessary on the fat nose of the Citations.

Thanks for the comments John! Maybe you just don't like weathering on models! Partly joking, partly serious. I'm not a pilot so I don't have the first hand experience with real aircraft like you do. But that doesn't mean my builds are less accurate because of this. It just means that I have to use a different set of references to base my modeling choices upon. First and foremost would be photos. Photos of the specific aircraft are best but similar type and theater of operations can be useful too. In this case, I have actual photos of the specific aircraft that I've been using as reference for my build. I've posted these photos before along with my explanations on why the drop tanks were weathered the way that they were but I'll repost them here for convenience.






Note the heavy wear on the drop tanks, specifically on frontal portions. Also note the lack of comparative wear on the nose and engine nacelles. Maybe the wear on Messerschmitt Me 262's during combat operations was quite different than civilian aircraft like Lears and Beeches? Admittedly, my efforts on the drop tank are not an exact reproduction but I tried to match what I see and I think the result is better than my first attempt anyway.

From the photos I've seen of your builds, I can surmise that weathering is not something you do, much less focus on. That's fine and dandy and I think there is a place for all types of modeling. But I withhold comment because I don't think it would be fair to say something like, "Nice build but I've never seen a wartime photo of a P-47 that clean". Weathering is a huge part of my modeling. I focus on it and I get geeked out by all the different techniques that I can employ to impart different weathering effects to my models. I don't think I'm great at it but it is a lot of fun and if I get a result that I like and get a few thumbs up from the SPAM crowd, life is good. I'm not asking you to build models like I do but I do ask that you try to understand that my modeling is different from yours. Not better just different.

I'm guessing like other aircraft the drop tanks on the Me262 was well droppable. Could the wear seen here be due to multiple drops and retrievals. I'm sure them falling back down to earth say hitting trees on the way could cause more wear than what in flight would do alone.