John Brown's Painted G1940 Set - by Spitfire38

Thanks! These photos make it easier to see the true colors.

I have posted pictures of the P40s that I painted for John; the photos are in the sections for the Chinese and the Americans. They feature the Flying Tigers and American P40s in various schemes in which they would have been seen during the war. Here is an image of them all; for a slightly closer look, check out the original posts at the front of this thread!

I received the Chinese decals, which means that I can go ahead and put those on the infantry and artillery to have those for you guys soon. I am going on vacation next week, so I will not be working then, but I will resume afterwards. The Chinese decals need to be hand-cut, which is painstaking work, but it’ll get done eventually.

@barney:

Those are Sweet! Bet it makes setting up the board even more fun! :)

Thanks Barney! As a painter, I can say that setting up the board very well might be my favorite part of the game. I don’t have many people to play with, so I have set it up before just to see all of the painted pieces and have fun with the game board.

@John:

Spitfire, what do you mean by hand cutting the decals, because I thought you have to cut them out any way, and then separate the paper from the decal?

Obviously, I haven’t used this other decal company.

Is all picoarmor decals like that, and what is different about them?

Can you explain? :-)
Thanks,

John

Yeah! Basically there are two kinds of decals, or at least two kinds of decals that I have worked with. All decals that I am working with are on transfer paper, so the decal loosens from the backing paper when it gets wet. These decals can be printed in one of two ways.

(1) The decal is printed such that each decal is individually divided, so if I cut out a sheet that has 5 flags on it, I can dip it in water, and then decide to slide off only 1 of the flags separate from the others. This is the type of decals that I-94 uses. I still have to cut the decals off of the sheet so that I don’t dip the entire sheet into the water at once, but I can take decals off one by one.

(2) All of the decals are printed on a single sheet of transfer paper, with no divisions between them. So, if I dip the decal sheet in water, the whole sheet will come off in one go, rather than being able to choose which ones I will take off. Those ones are like a temporary tattoo. (Does anyone want 15 Japanese flags on their arm? Weird tattoo :P ) So, to use individual decals, I need to cut them off of the sheet and into the shape that I want them. Thankfully I have been able to just cut the Chinese roundels into squares rather than circles; the edges are transparent, so as long as it doesn’t extend over the wing, it looks like a circle. The implication of this kind of decal is basically that I can’t do application in quick assembly line fashion, because I have to cut out each individual decal rather than do them in sets of 2, 3, or 4. So it just takes a good bit longer. This kind of decal is used by Picoarmor.

Side note: shoutout to Picoarmor! They have amazing customer service. I had a problem with their online ordering process (ended up being a server glitch), but they responded very promptly to my email, put me in touch with their webmaster, and followed up with me to make sure that everything was good. They also let me know that they had packaged and shipped my decals. Awesome customer experience.

@cyanight:

Very nice Job on those Spitfire!  I love them… Never thought to make the teeth with dots instead of a white line. That really puts a good perspective on it. Well done sir!

And I never thought to make them with a white line - that would probably look pretty cool. It just goes to show that we all have very different approaches coming in. That’s why I like these forums, because you get to learn new things from other people.

Thanks for the compliment. I appreciate it!

@Proud:

Nice work on those P40s there Spitfire.

Thanks! I appreciate it.

@jwo1984:

These P40’s look awesome Spitfire! well done on the shark mouths…they aren’t easy to do and those teeth turned out very nicely! I wonder if we can get decals in the future for the shark mouths??

Thank you! I am happy with how they turned out as well. As Cyanight said, “Every artist is their worst critic”, which I have certainly found to be the case :) The shark’s teeth are just white dots - no triangles or anything like that. I used a toothpick to dot the . You will likely have to wipe the tip of the toothpick off each time and get more paint on it each time if you want the precise, small dots. Decals might make it easier - I do not know of any company that provides them, but I am sure you could find them. The difficulty would be finding tiny ones. I personally prefer hand painted, but decals are growing on me as I paint John’s set. They are rather expensive and time consuming, but they give you really crisp looking roundels and stars!

For anyone wondering how I would paint the American star roundel by hand… I wouldn’t. I have found that I cannot paint stars that look good when they are that small, so I generally abstract it and paint it as a white dot in a blue circle or something like that.