Painting Zeros wrong in Blood Red Skies - how to do it quickly! :-)

 

One of the big unanswered questions, just behind "Is there a God?", "Why do we dream?", "Is our universe the only one?" and "Why did they cancel Firefly but fund Star Trek Discovery?" is "What colour are early war Zeros?"

The only thing I'm certain of is they're not white. Probably. Why we still think they're white is a story for another day, and quite interesting, but I'm not going there now. The debate over the actual colour is still going on - the real experts seem to think a sort of light grey with a green-y tint, and Tamiya and others will sell you some paint for it. The only problem is I don't think it looks "right". I suspect that this is partly because the paints are designed to be used on 1:48 scale models and that at 1:200 for BRS you need to lighten them up. Whatever

Anyway this is how I'm painting mine. It is embarrassingly simple and quick yet I think it looks good enough for the table.

Step 1 undercoat with GW Wraithbone Contrast undercoat spray. Wraithbone is a funny off white colour designed for painting elves or fairies or something, but it just about ticks the box and takes 30 seconds or so to apply.

Step 2 block in the canopy in your colour of choice. I use a light blue but there are many ways to paint canopies and it is personal preference. Also paint the engine cowl. It could be black, but I stopped painting black stuff black on my BRS models and tend to use Vallejo German Grey because I think it looks better. Go back over the bits you missed and the canopy bars with "normal" GW Wraithbone paint.

Step 3 use GW Contrast Apothecary White to paint he panel lines. You follow the panel lines with a thin brush rather than wash the whole area down. This is the longest bit of the  process but is still pretty fast. 

Once dry, apply your decals of choice and you are done.

The models are A6M2s from the PlanePrinter Patreon printed on my Anycubic Photon, but the process works on any suitable model. Decals are from the "spares" box, mostly Warlord but some others thrown in. Yes it is certainly (probably) the wrong colour, but if these are on the table at a convention 98% of the passers by will see and immediately recognise them as Zeros, which is good enough for me.

Cheers

 

    

Blood Red Skies Digital - Shot Down in Flames

 

In case you missed it, the Kickstarter for Blood Red Skies Digital that I mentioned earlier failed to fund. This was a pretty big disappointment and a shame because the game was very promising.

There are MANY reasons for this I'm sure, so comments below if you want to discuss it - I'll get popcorn.

Cheers 

I've not been doing nuthin, but I may have achieved that - lockdown blues

If someone had told me a year ago we would be locked down and couldn't socialise or play our table top games I would have been ..... hold on, they pretty much did. This is bad.

What I find most depressing is just how much I thought I could get done on hobby projects ready for the great day when the clubs , hobby centres and stores reopened, compared to what I have actually achieved. I have only myself to blame. Painting had slowed to the point where I was basically doing the same thing day in and day out - and painting was not on the list. After an initial gush of enthusiasm, "now I will have time to get stuck in to that pile of shame", the realisation hit that I was not going to be going back to the gaming table soon, so why bother? So I went and watched Peaky Blinders instead*.

I'm happy to report this fugue is slowly lifting and I'm starting to paint up some Blood Red Skies models, and that is leading on to me picking up other "stuff" that is lying around. But it is clear with hindsight I miss my gaming. Not the physical dice rolling so much as the socialising and companionship it brings, and that the loss of something apparently so trivial has had a big impact on my mental state - this last year has been a bit of a challenge. 

Anyway, hopefully now we are getting vaccinated there will be a return to gaming. Yup, let's hear it for gamers, the slow players, the obsessives, the "long inchers", the smug "oh my dice are hot tonighters", the casual cba to read the rules guys, the Grognards with the Lace Wars fetish and an army from a Dutchy in some Mid German region that only existed for seventeen months, the tournament players who insist that even though what they are proposing is clearly physically impossible they can do it because the rules dont specifically say you can't,  the 40K players who don't look beyond GW, the "we play it this way" brigade, and Dave, who paints brilliantly but puts Afrika Korps markings on JagdPanthers. I can't say how much I'm looking forward to meeting up with you all again.

Cheers   

*not just Peaky Blinders - why don't we have any PB style figures btw - seems a gap ??