Hi fellow modellers!

I recently bought a Supermodel Blohm und Voss Bv-138 kit. It came with raised panel lines. I haven't built an airplane model in quite a while. Instead of trying to scribe the plane completely, I've been poring over photos and am thinking about using lines of paint under the RLM colors for the panel lines that would be less noticeable. For example, I would scribe engine nacelle covers, access plates, and anything else that was used for maintenance, while doing seams between the structural panels before thin layers of the camo were applied.

Does anyone have a technique, or know of a site that does?

Thank you for reading.

Gary

Edited for typos

I'm no expert at this myself. I have seen very good results by others achieved by drawing the panel lines on to the primer coat with a ultra fine Sharpy paint marker.

Talented people use Dymo marker tape to form straight edge guides for laying such marks.

another option is to use Microscale black or grey, or silver decal stripes either under or over the finish paint, depending on transparency of such.

Hi Gary

I must admit I smooth down and re-scribe raised panel lines, but I've seen some nice results from running a very sharp pencil along one side of raised lines. You need to keep the pencil as sharp as you can, and be consistent on which side of each line you mark to create a sort of highlight and highlight effect.

All the best

Rowan

Thank you for those great answers. None of those ideas were anywhere in my head. I may have to do some experimentation on some sheet styrene so I can see which works best. ...first I have to get some styrene...

Thanks for reading and thank you again for the answers!

Gary

Gary! I would love to follow a build blog of that BV-138! It is such a bizarre aircraft!



Magnus

Hi Magnus! Thank you for your interest! I like to build the rarer birds when I can find them. I haven't done a blog before, but it looks like I can do something similar in the 'pre-flight check' forum. Lol...unless someone informs me I cannot.


Thank you for reading!

Gary

Content edited after further exploration of the site.

Gary,
Most of us can attest to the fact that rescribing is a lot harder then it looks, and has a very long learning curve. Believe me, I can attest to that 1st hand. I've seen and tried just about every technique out there including buying one scriber after another. It's all about practice, practice, and more practice. Straight lines on a flat surface are relatively easy. But for the most part there are very few flat and level surfaces on an aircraft.

I've settled on Dymo tape, and for curved surfaces I 1st use a fine tooth saw blade to score a line. Then I switch to the UMM-USA scriber to deepen the recessed lines using both sides.

For raised panel lines, I've seen a few examples where a pin wash was used on one side of the raised panel lines only. And as Rowan said, you need to be consistent to which side you decide to use.

Joel

Hi Gary,

I don´t know how popular the technique is out of Spain, so please forgive me if I am trying to re-discover America. But I remember that some years ago, before the Internet, the trending method in modelling magazines was an airbrushed POST-shading with ink (dark gray or sepia), using a piece of "post-it" (the famous 3M yellow, green, pink or blue adhesive paper note) as a quick repositionable masking.

But today pre-shading is almost universal. I suppose it is more forgiving.

Greetings, and good luck with that bird.

Thank you for your thoughts. I have made scribing attempts in the pre-Internet past. All of my attempts looked bad....ok not bad...abysmal. Then I was out of building aircraft for years. I know I could try Dymo tape. But I really would prefer to avoid scribing altogether.

I'll get some styrene sheet from my local hobby store and the paints I want to use. Then I can experiment for a while without using any sharp tools.

Thank you for reading!