DONE: Finished Kittyhawk IV -Curtiss P-40N RAAF 76 Sqn G-SV A29-1140 Group Build
#2 Pacific Theater of OperationsDiscuss DONE: Finished Kittyhawk IV -Curtiss P-40N RAAF 76 Sqn G-SV A29-1140 Group Build in the Group Builds forums; Absolutly excellent!...
Medium green for the splotch work done - cut masks using a scaled 1/48 drawing by cutting out the tail and using a picture of A29-1138 as a guide. '38 is two aircraft away in production to A29-1140 and should be similar. I toned down the medium green with 25% white to fade it like the olive drab. Here's the pics.
The drawings can be found in the book "Airwar 55 - Curtiss P-40 part IV. The book is in Russian by the look, but it has good pictures and drawings. My Russian is poor to non-existent!
Thanks guys - all this great feedback is keeping me motivated. It usually takes me 6 months to finish one, and I need to double my speed to finish on time!
Terry, you are not going to like this, but I wasted more Tamiya tape.
The splotches turned out real good, so I decided to go for gold and do the tail thunderbolts in paint, rather than decals. I created masks using the Tamiya tape and this is how it turned out.
If you want more pictures on how I did this, yell.
Some where there is a guy who is paid to come with these camo patterns.....
I was thinking the same thing. The patterns I could never make sense of were the German ETO schemes with blotch sides, splinter spines and wings and variations thereof. Their desert schemes made much more sense. Any nation's camo schemes get chuckles when you consider they were all over-painted with hi-viz national markings and color bands and in the case of certain Forces look-at-me hi-viz yellow leading edges which were dead give-aways to their opponents. A single color top and bottom was just as effective. I dunno. I'm thinking paint-by-committee.
I've always thought that about some of the hi-vis 'recognition' markings too! Let's design a highly effective camouflage pattern, which will take many man-hours of work and countless field trials, not to mention much experimentation with paint colours, hues, finishes and types. Then, when we are happy that we have the best possible compromise to allow effective concealement on the ground and in the air, with the least effect on performance, we can splat on some colour, just to liven things up a bit!
Have to admit though, the luftwaffe camouflage was a modification of the original dark patterns, starting with the extension of the undrside blue colour up the sides of the fuselage, to be more effective in the bright skies during the winter of 1940 to '41. The mottling originated as a result of needing to tone-down this modification for operations over the Channel and southern England from the BoB onwards, and the later patterns were an extension of this. Even though a compromise, in order to achieve concealment on the ground, ground to air and air to air, these later schemes did work well from all accounts.
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Nicely done Peter!
Originally Posted by vikingBerserker
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