Well here are some pictures of my almost done (?) wildcat. Everything went pretty well until the wash. It was really hard to remove with all the tons and tons of raised little rivets.

I still need to:
- paint rear wheel / gear
- take care of all lights
- install clear parts and drop tanks
- do flat finish (especially on the tires)
- put on pastels (exhaust, gun powder burns (is that what you call it), etc)
- weather decals
- Anything else you would suggest?

Also, I am considering trying to remove most of the wash as it looks really dark. What do you all think?

Finally, can anyone give me advice on painting the carrier deck base? I am color blind and not good at just guessing colors (and of course no directions came with it )

Anyway thanks for any suggestions / comments.

Leon

I think you have done a very nice work on painting there buddy. Tha panel lines are well toned and i believe with some fading and washing and dusting you ll get off this brand new polished look. Buy the built is very nice.

Good job, Leon, almost perfect, washed is excellent, but for the carrier deck base its to dark, I think you better paint it with dark gull gray,

Looks really nice as a build, but, since you brought it up, IMHO, the panel lines are overdone.

Funny how a few years ago Matchbox had a line of model aircraft and the complaint was that the panel llines were too big. Along comes Hasegawa with its higly defined panel lines on its box art and suddenly, overemphasized panel lines are almost de rigueur .

Thanks. I'm hoping that I can make it look a little used in the next step.




Thank you. Now I have a color. Would you then do a wash with black? or a really dark gray?




Yeah, I agree. I will probably try to take the wash off and try again with a lighter color or just a wash of a darker version of the base color (is that a good technique?)



Anyway. Thanks for the comments so far. I would really like to make it look good as it is definately the best I have done in my relatively short stint with the hobby.

Hi Leon

That looks really tasty! Firstly, nice job getting the fuselage star to sit well over all those rivets! :-)

The panel washing is (maybe) a little too intense, but I'm the last one who should comment, because I'm often guilty of over weathering myself.

Where I'd take issue with AJ is that it's Tamiya (IMHO), not Hasegawa, who are sometimes a bit heavy handed. Either way, the finely scribed lines on a lot of short-run kits put them both to shame.

The two points I'd make in regard your pics are:

The carrier deck looks very shiny... as other have pointed out, lighter would be good, but a matt coat (and maybe some tire marks and staining?) would also help.

Maybe sand a little off the bottom of each main-wheel to represent the weight of the aircraft. I know opinions vary on weighted tires, but all my reference pics show Wildcats with distinctly flattened tires.

Hope this helps

Rowan

I think (?) I read somewhere that you can flatten the tires by lightly pressing the tires against a warm iron protected with waxed paper...has anyone tried this? Maybe I will give it a shot with my spitfire that went wrong and is now a practice model