Part I | PART II| Part III | Part IV

When approaching a biplane, I think it’s helpful to consider them as a completely different genre from other aircraft. Literally, as distinctly apart as armor or ships.

With your traditional monowing aircraft, the build process is straightforward. Once the interior is sorted, you slap it together, do the seam repairs, paint it and decal it. Basically.

With biplanes, and especially depending on your scheme, this just isn’t an option. If nothing else, you’d be crazy to do full assembly before you do the painting because of the two wings. With the Snipe, I’ve taken things even further, doing almost all of the painting before and during the assembly process. I call it “pailding”. Painting + building, simultaneously.

I started by painting the cockpit shielding Tamiya XF-82 Ocean Gray, which we saw in Part I:

Clear Doped Linen

After the shielding, I moved on to the bottom of the wings and control surfaces, which I painted Tamiya XF-55 Deck Tan. I then came back with Deck Tan mixed with a touch of Dark Earth and X-19 Smoke to provide some distinction between the fabric and the ribs:

To add some further definition, I taped off the ribs and sprayed a thinned coat of X-19 smoke over the tape lines, as well as some Flat Brown inboard as a start to representing linen dirtied by the engine.

This was chased with a thinned coat of Deck Tan to blend everything together.

The Airscrew

While the under surfaces cured, I moved on to the airscrew. This one’s tricky, with a central hub of varnished wood, then gray on the forward-facing surfaces and black on the backside. I used my scraped-oil method for the central hub…

Only this time I added some burnt sienna and black to the oil to get better definition against the darker XF-52 Flat Earth.

Once the woodgraining was complete I masked the center portion with a mix of Tamiya tape and liquid frisket, then shot the blades with Gunze Flat Black.

The backsides were then masked and the fronts painted XF-82 Ocean Gray.

Topside Green

Moving on to the topside, I mixed up my own shade using Tamiya XF-65 Field Gray, XF-22 RLM Gray and XF-60 Dark Yellow (just a few drops) and shot it on over a base of Gunze Flat Black. I was sure to spray over the ribs and various contours first to provide a start to visually defining the wing surfaces.

Next, I taped off the ribs and went over the tape with thinned X-19 Smoke…

And then went back over them with a thinned coat of my topside green to blend everything together.

The Bentley BR.2

The engine was a piece of cake – especially next to the over-engineered mess of an R-2800 I fought on the Trumpeter Jug. Painted it up with Alclad stuff, gave it a wash of MIG Oil & Grease Stains, and that’s really about it. The engine looks damn sharp on its own and doesn’t need much help.

Fuselage is Go

Once I got the principal painting done, I pre-rigged the fuselage, glued it together, fought the seam battle up top, then painted over where the glue/sanding/filling work had obliterated the paint.

Stay tuned for decals!

Part I | PART II| Part III | Part IV