Part I | Part II | PART III | Part IV

The Swiss 109 has been built, puttied, sanded, primed and made ready for paint. Time to do it to it!

Candy Canes

After laying down a black base (Tamiya X-1), I sprayed the white for the wings and rudder, using my trusty Gunze Mr. Color C69 Offwhite.

Knowing that the visual clutter of colors on this bird will knock down any changes in contrast among the white, I didn’t go for 100% even coverage, and stopped probably one or two passes short of where my mind wanted me to.

I wanted to wait for the wings to cure before masking them for the neutrality stripes, but the rudder was fair game, so I put down the masks for the rudder crosses (courtesy of Joe at Scale Precision Masks) and then sprayed the red.

After giving the white a night to cure up, I masked the candy canes. The Victory Productions decal sheet I used for inspiration gave the stripes some absurdly exact widths…down to hundredths of a millimeter. Being human, I opted for straight-up millimeters – 40mm for the big cross patches, and 15mm for the stripes. I cut these first on post-it notes to see how it would all lay out, then used them as masking guides.

Once I had the stripes masked…using my preferred method of a strip on top and a strip on bottom, pinched together at the leading edges of the wings, I placed the big Swiss crosses. This is my second build using vinyl paint masks, and for 1/32 I can’t recommend them highly enough.

With the masking done, the red was shot, and the masks removed.

Even with just the red laid down, you can already see how the local contrast of the white has flattened out.

Camoflage

With the wing stripes painted, I masked everything off and painted the undersides with Gunze RLM 65. This went down a bit weird – I think there might have been an issue with the Tamiya X-1 I put down as a base.

Once this set, I masked it as well, and moved on to the upper camoflage. This called for a brown somewhat like RAF Dark Earth, which didn’t seem right to me, as the pictures of this plane show a far lighter shade, so I cut it with some RLM 79 Sandgelb and C69 Offwhite.

Overall, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the shade. I think good, rich browns are still one of my bigger stumbling blocks as a modeler.

Moving on to the green – the Victory sheet calls this out as being very close to RLM 70 Black Green, which I tried momentarily and yeah, no way. I switched to RLM 80 Olivegrun and freehanded it with my Iwata HP-C+.

Even with the green, the brown felt somewhat washed out and sickly, so I sprayed a filter coat of Tamiya Clear Orange to warm things up a bit, then removed the masking and applied the fuselage stencils (also courtesy of Scale Precision Masks).

And with that, principal painting wrapped up.

Part I | Part II | PART III | Part IV