Zvezda Airbus A-321 - 1:144 - WizzAir

Treehugger
Interesting how this paint scheme is something that doesn't require decals in white, pink adn blue, I mean one can just airburush on all the three main colors.

Thomas Kolb
Treehugger, yes, that's the plan. But TBH, I would have preferred decals, as finding that magenta color was an absolute nightmare: none of the existing model paints I could find comes even close. I will be using Motip automotive acrylics decanted from a rattle can - that is the closest match.

Łukasz Gliński
Gunze lately issued some odd pinky shades, check it out 🙂

Thomas Kolb
Łukasz, I will, thanks for the tip. I was checking out the WizzAir Airbuses here at Landvetter Airport to try to get the color right, but damit, that is one elusive color, it seems to be shifting with the light... bluish one day and reddish the other... I guess I will just wing it.

Nathan Dempsey
Looking great so far! I had the same issue trying to find the "ice blue" for an Air Canada livery. It just looks different in every picture or each time I actually saw one at the local airport.

Thomas Kolb
Nathan Dempsey, thanks! Yes, it is always difficult to get colors right, even when you have the official color number or swatches: things look completely different in 1:144 scale... that is why I almost always end up creating my own paint mixes, based on photos and gut feel. What looks right usually is.

Łukasz Gliński
In case you haven't found these links before:
britmodeller.com/for..-air-pink-any-clues/
modelwork.pl/topic/9..s-320-1144-wizz-air/
The latter is in Polish only, one of them suggests the Helvetic Magenta paint and after all they redirect to a HAD page which is not valid anymore 🙁

Thomas Kolb
Łukasz, thank you! Yes, I saw the BM article, but the Helvetic Magenta is unfortunately no longer carried by Hannants so it is more or less unobtainable. The Motip paint that I bought is on the other hand pretty close - actually almost perfect, so I will be using that.

Thomas Kolb
Yaay, my Stynylrez primer has arrived in the mail, so I can resume building!

Nathan Dempsey
Good to hear 🙂

Thomas Kolb
Priming done, next I will rub down all primed surfaces with a rubbing cloth to get a perfectly smooth surface for the final paint coat. And then I have a ton of things to prepare, such as the engines nacelles, landing gears, antennas and the dropped slats.

Łukasz Gliński
Your pics reminded me I should hoover my spraying booth😉 Nice priming, waiting for the pink of course 🙂

Thomas Kolb
I finally started to do the painting - I needed to figure out the best sequence with the different color zones to ease the masking - I will be starting with the light gray wing parts, over to the dark gray upper wing surfaces, the white nose, the pink middle section and finally the blue aft section, followed by a myriad of unpainted metallic parts. I will need to force myself to be patient and allow a lot of drying time between the colors to avoid the masking tape to rip into the paint layers... Zen time, I guess.

Nathan Dempsey
Oh yes time to go slowly for sure.

Thomas Kolb
This afternoon I finished the painting of the wings - the medium gray Corogard areas were surprisingly tricky to paint and required an incredible amount of masking - the areas are not just straight triangles but have a lot of tiny angles and corners. On the real aircraft there is a slight metallic sheen to these areas as the paint contains aluminium particles, but after some experiments I found that using solid gray looks far more realistic in 1:144 scale. Mixing in some metallic paint made it look like a toy.

Next step will be to paint the white nose, but it will have to wait until the weekend, because work.

Nathan Dempsey
Lovely work on the wings. What were the two grey colors you used?

Thomas Kolb
Nathan Dempsey & Heikki Väyrynen, thank you! I used my own mix of Tamiya acrylics, mainly Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey mixed with various amounts of white. I will need to apply high shine gloss later and also a healthy dose of weathering, so I need to keep it a little lighter for now.

Thomas Kolb
Nose sprayed high gloss white - but I also managed to knock off one of the resin sharklets... 🙁 Damit, that's one tricky repair session in store... I decanted the magenta and ultramarine paints from the rattle cans for airbrush use, so tomorrow I will try to find some time to mask off the part for the pink and see how it works out.

Nathan Dempsey
Hopefully you can get the sharklet repaired. The decanted colors look nice 🙂

Łukasz Gliński
Finally my most expected part - pink vs Swedish winter 😄

Thomas Kolb
The magenta is done - some fixes will need to be done here and there, but generally it turned out pretty good. Next I have to do the blue tail section, but that will have to wait for a few days as I am not sure about the curing time for this paint.

Nathan Dempsey
The pink looks great! Now the waiting game 🙂

Thomas Kolb
Hans Robben, yes, I would like to build one of the WizzAir A320's in the previous pink/purple livery too, but unfortunately the BOA decal sheet for that scheme is sold out everywhere (at least here in Europe).

Nathan Dempsey
I just checked all my shops here in the USA for that decal. Its sold out everywhere here too. Come on BOA! Time to print more!

Thomas Kolb
A bit of a setback... Upon close investigation under bright light I noticed that the pink paint seems to have gone on with a nasty orange peel effect at some places around the wings. Yeah, unknown paint with new thinner ratio and compressor air pressure requirements, so that was kind of expected. So now I can now either just live with it, try to polish it back, or strip the paint and redo everything.

Yeah, who am I kidding, of course I will redo it.

Treehugger
Did the paint start to flake off or something? I've seen my multi layered gloss coats on top of primer and black on a submarine kit project that in places turned into a crackled pattern because of me not letting each layer dry for long enough time I suspect, but maybe some entirely differenet type of issue.

Łukasz Gliński
Pity, on the pics it looks fine

Thomas Kolb
I think I found out the reason for the rough paint - it is that strange "pebbly" molded surface of the model that I didn't sand off completely around the wings and at some hard-to-reach places. You can clearly see it on picture 9. The primer and the paint coat gradually amplified this effect and with a super-gloss coat it became very visible. Now I have stripped off the paint down to the bare plastic and carefully buffed all surfaces - so I should be good to go with the repaint. This is becoming the most time-consuming builds in a long time!

Łukasz Gliński
Sound familiar, kind of quick-build-curse, which takes 24 months after all😉

Thomas Kolb
[Waiting a bit to regain my strength...]

Łukasz Gliński
Thought you may like this one: A320 WizzAir | Album by milczacy (1:144)

Thomas Kolb
Lukasz, yes, that's a nice one, now I am actually starting to feel the urge to resume this kit again! I just need to practise gloss painting, currently I suck at it.