Shading/biasing for orange paint?
 

I've been puttering with a 1/18th scale die-cast Porsche painted in a factory color of Lava Orange. Since its a newer Auto Art release, the paint work is good but it came out pretty heavy around the fill door for the gas cap (on the right-front fender).

:k_confused:

I've been able to carefully scribe out the extra thick paint in the recesses around the filler door and I tracked down some authentic orange paint to match the body, but I'm wondering if anyone has tried to shade or bias orange paint, and what did you use?

I've tried some shades of darker orange and mixed some darker shades of orange-brown and orange-red but the shading doesn't look right. I'm thinking of trying a fresh coat of Lava Orange in the recess area then adding some thinned down Tamiya "clear smoke" and/or "turn signal amber" to give the recess a little more definition (darker but just slightly). :hmmm:

Anyone have a better idea? Lava Orange is a tricky shade. Its mostly a bright orange but also has a "creamsickle" white-ish quality to it.

Do you hand paint or use a quality air brush?
By quality I mean the type that can do a line the thickness of a pencil point
and allow total flow control at the same time.
Double action I believe it's called.
I prefer Paasche myself.

Airbrushes and apartments don't get along (unless you have a super-cool landlord). :03:

The channel I want to shade is maybe .2-.3 mm wide so I'm going to trust a good 000 brush and really thin down a clear type of paint like "black smoke" to get the effect (or a 50/50 mix of black smoke and clear varnish). For example, Tamiya panel liner would be too heavy (I already tried it), it needs to be very subtle- just enough to highlite the outline of the door. :doh: On the real car, the fuel door covers an area that's painted the same shade as the rest of the car. What I've got now is an area that used to look like a bulge in the fender before I carved out the extra paint in the channel, if that makes sense. :doh:

The other plan is mix maybe 1 part of Tamiya clear (turn signal) orange with 3 or 4 parts of clear gloss then really thin it down and apply it over the Lava Orange base coat. :hmmm:

One thing about Lava Orange is that it looks like a fairly "bright" or strong shade of orange in strong light but looks more "pastel" in darker conditions. Weird but neat. :up:

So, I repainted the panel line of the filler door with the Lava Orange paint last night and wanted to let it set and cure for a couple of days.
Looking at it today, aside from doing some minor polishing and buffing where some "micro chips" happened while I was removing the old paint, I think I'm done. :up:

It looks like a gas filler door on the fender now. The shading idea would have been tricky (and I still might try it later) but for now I'm happy to leave it alone.

I still want to create a US license plate and frame and order a 1/18th scale seat belt/harness set from a shop I found on-line (in Italy) and this project will be finished. :yeah:

I have a really small compressor used only for airbrush work.
When I was in apartments I had a small box with a small fan I used to expell any fumes out the window.
You can hardly hear the air compressor running and again it is tiny!
a 12 pack is bigger then it.
:haha:

I had one of the original Tamiya "Spraywork" air brushes back when I lived in the barracks in Sasebo and Pearl. :up: That was the single stage (really cheap) airbrush with the 12 volt RC battery powered compressor (which I modified to run off a plug-in 12 volt converter).
While the airbrush really was cheap, it held up for many years and survived a move across the Pacific while painting everything from 1/144th scale bombers to 1/24th scale cars and a resin 1/128th scale Los Angeles class fast attack. :D

The one big problem with any air brush is over spray. Even if you are religious about using a fume extractor, you're going to wind up with over spray somewhere, usually on the floor or the walls.

Like I said, you need to have a super-cool landlord in that case. :yep: