In the last few months I've become adept at painting "small" with heavily thinned paint (70% lacquer thinner to 30% paint) and a .2mm needle. After reading people like Matt from Doog's models I also became a convert to the black basing technique.

In the past I had used the hairspray/chipping fluid technique in armor but following the traditional approach of thinning Tamiya acrylics 50% with water with great results and more limited success thinning it with X-20A but still useful for many applications, however, with armor my painting approach is not so subtle as with aircraft.

Since adopting the black basing technique I have not chipped anything using hairspray so I thought I might give it a try in what seems to be a recipe for disaster: Lacquer-thinned paint + several layers.

In this thread I will keep you updated with the progress of my tests. My test subject is Tamiya's 1/48 A6m5 (kit 61103) and I intend to chip it in several layers.

To do so I'm going to paint the hinomarus and the yellow stripe in the leading edge of the wings, the idea behind it is to get enough chipping so that chips of the underlying green and metal will show through.

This is the intended sequence

1. Vallejo Metal Color dull aluminum
2. Lacquer based clear coat? (still undecided)
3. Ammo scratches effects
4. Black basing with Tamiya XF-1, XF-12 for the underside and XF-70 for the top surfaces, chipping more heavily than usual the areas where the hinomarus will be painted
5. Scratches effects again (only in the hinomarus and leading edge)

6. If everything goes well I'll have some multi-layered chips with green and aluminum around the red and yellow.


Now I'm sure many of you will cringe when reading this and probably think there is no way that will work. There are two main areas of concern here, one is the lacque thinner, which doesn't chip as well as water-based and the other concern is the black base showing through between the bare metal and the top coat.


Well, I've already done some testing in my paint mule and the results are surpisingly positive. Then I went ahead and I have already painted and chipped the underside of the zero (no hinomarus yet). The preliminary observations I have is that for some reason chipping was easier in the paint mule than on the final subject. However, the results in the final subject are quite subtle and in my opinion more interesting than on the paint mule.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos but I'll try to post them as soon as possible which I'm sure will be easier to understand than all the nonsense I wrote here.