stunthanger.com
Building Tips and technical articles. => Paint and finishing => Topic started by: Dennis Leonhardi on October 16, 2018, 11:52:36 PM
-
Strictly aesthetics, no right or wrong answer: What's the best (most realistic) color to paint a canopy on a profile?
Say you build a Sig Twister and paint it with the color scheme shown on the box, but choose your own color for the canopy area …
TIA!
Dennis
-
If you are painting the plane red with black trim, then I agree with Ty. Pale blue or French gray with white highlights. I'd paint a red canopy frame somewhere in there too, just to give some more interest. Another alternative is a smoke gray if you can mix up something like that. On full sized planes, a bubble canopy like the one on the Akro is a real sauna, so guys tend to use pretty heavily dyed plexiglass. That is not really much of a disadvantage, since they aren't flown at night much.
I also use black sometimes, but your base color is already pretty dark, and your trim is black, so I don't think that combination works as well.
I personally don't like the way white or silver looks for canopies.
Good luck with yours!
Dave
PS--You didn't mention what your paint system is going to be. So I will throw in a random comment: If you are using rattle can paint, such as Rustoleum, I have had good luck painting the basic canopy and then just misting the edges with the highlight color. (For example, red plane, black canopy, silver highlight.) I have also mixed Rustoleum by spraying two different colors into cups, mixing until I liked the shade, thinning and then airbrushing the canopy and highlight. Just depends on how much effort you want to put into it. The hardest part for me is knowing when to stop adding highlight....a little bit more is not always better!
-
For a model that has many colors, white works well.
Black with a silver perimeter always works well no matter what color the model is.
-
It really depends on the color of the rest of the plane, and your own sense of aesthetics. Well, and if you live in Portland or Seattle it's unrealistic to paint it blue -- gray is sky color around here.
-
The bluest sky you've ever seen is in Seattle! Right before it turns grey, of course. It's the moisture in the atmosphere that makes it appear as blue. The more moisture, the bluer it looks. Hmmm, I was expecting a spelling error signal there...the red swiggly line under the woid.
Lots of airplanes have smoked plexiglass windows, so I'd say a nice smoke color. That's grey. I'm not so sure about the highlighting idea. Could easily be overdone, and likely to be in the wrong places. n1 Steve
-
Thanks for the feedback, guys!
Dennis
-
A very pale blue, like a faded sky blue, with white highlights. D>K
Good Idea! It was gray auto primer before it was blue. The gray was good, the blue better.
Ken