Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to receive my first ever commissioned project in the form of a Tamiya 1/48 F-14D. Having built Tamiya’s F-14A the year prior, I was fairly comfortable around the kit and knew what I was getting into on the project. I opted to keep things simple for the build, seeing as someone else was paying for the kit and the aftermarket accessories. Aside from some aftermarket seats, decals, and munitions, the project was built OOB and it was a nice change from my previous tomcat project.
Construction began with the cockpit and progressed smoothly due to the lack of complexity that a lot of aftermarket adds. I painted the cockpit tub with the same colours I used on my F-14A project and picked out the various switches and dials with the paintbrush. Where I did spend some extra time was in the decaling and weathering of this area. I utilized Anyz decals to add some visual interest to the cockpit as this is a fairly easy way to enhance the area. I used oil paints for weathering to add a dirty/grimy look in the recesses. One technique I’m rapidly becoming a fan of is adding a light grey wash into the side panels. This creates the effect that each subsection is separated from the others and that the grey colour can be seen in between the various sections. I find that this approach is easier and more convincing than trying to achieve this look during the painting stage.
After the completion of the cockpit, I moved on to the nose gear bay. Like the cockpit, the nose gear was finished in a similar style to my previous Tomcat. After painting and picking out the various details, I sealed the bay in a gloss varnish for decals. Using a mix of Anyz and Jira-Gio decals, I added placards wherever I felt that they were needed, not going by specific references. The weathering of the bay was done over a satin varnish. Following some general dust effects with oils, I went back over it with a black pinwash to highlight all the details.
That’ll be it for now, details on this project will be somewhat more sparse due to the fact that I recently built a F-14 and that most of the details will be the same as with that build.
Leave a Reply