Type 2 Ka-Mi – Part 3: First highlights

By miniarmour on April 6, 2012 • ( 2 Comments )

Tamiya offers quite a wide range of grey colour paints in their acrylics range, so I had to choose which one to choose for the following painting steps.

I decided to use IJN Grey XF-75 as I liked the shade and it was sufficiently lighter compared to the base coat. From my own experience, It is always better to use paints with higher contrast for different layers, as the contrast is usually toned down during the application of filters. If the contrast is small, the colors of the model at the end blend too much and it loses much of its vibrancy.

Having decided for the shade, I applied this paint mixed in a bit thinner consistency than usual – about 5:1 ratio of thinner:paint, so that I could build the highlighting effect gradually and to have more control over the placement of the paint. I tried to avoid covering all the surface of the model, I rather focused on the horizontal surfaces, centers of the panels and different surface parts and tried to avoid edges and welding lines.

For the wheels the process was bit more complicated. Ka-Mi has the type of running gear which is bit more difficult to pain because you have to build the components of wheels first and paint them afterwards. Because portion of the wheels are covered, the choice is either to paint the wheels by hand or use some masking if using airbrush. I decided for the latter.

First I used geometric circle-shaped stencil to paint the inner parts of the wheels. I did not try to have precise delineation between the rubber and the metal part of the wheel. I tried this few times, and in my opinion the effect does not looked good. In fact, having softer transition looks much more realistic.

After painting the wheels in this way, I masked he rubber portion of the wheels and painted the remaining part of the wheel arms.

Since there was bit more overspray of the grey over the rubber paint than I wanted, I decided to darken the rubber with black oil filter/wash. I mixed thick mix of artist black oil paint and oil thinner and applied this along the rim of the wheels. Applying oil wash is much easier than trying to paint the rubber parts of the wheels by paint with acrylics, as you do not have to worry about brush control, the surface tension will deposit the wash in the right place with little effort.