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Su-27UB Ukrainian Flanker Twin Seater pt.2

Once finished with the building itself and all the troubles I’ve encountered, I needed to make the painting realistic as much as possible.
There are no good quality pictures of this particular aircraft, and if there are some, they are off color. The one I showed in Part 1 of this article is the best possible. At least it is close in colors. I have seen few Ukrainian flankers in person since 1995 and I can tell that for sure.

In order to make it look more “Ukrainian” I needed to make it look clean, but
worn. So good pre-shading is required. Actually, the best shading for aircraft is not using pre- or post-shading techniques with airbrush, but do it with enamels. Trust me, being around aircraft all my life, for a military plane, this is the way to go. However, since I was scared of ruin the camouflage, I decided to do the shading before, and not after.

First I did a round with dark grey, then painted the white parts, and just after that some fixes of the shading with diluted dark.
For some, the camouflage might look extremely hard to be done, but I will tell you what: it is extremely boring. that is because you need to use 3/4 masking time, and 1/4 painting time. Hard lines of that camouflage requires it to be done that way.
The paints are my own recipe too. I used Tamiya Acrylics, diluted with isopropyl-aclohol, but with few additions to make the color as they should be.
First one color, then masking, then another paint and so on.
I have received tens of emails regarding the paints since the moment I first published the project in the forums. I try to help, but is mostly the eye that you need for it. There are a lot of shades and you need to find the base color for all the three tones, and then add some additional drops of the other two /or white/.
Almost done

Actually, one of my colors is a bit off. The pale blue gotta be more blueish than it is. But anyway, its the closes one I’ve ever managed to create.

Finishing the paint process took some time, due to the cold weather and slow curing process of the paints. When you mask so much, you gotta be careful! And as you can see, the paint layers are pretty thin so the pre-shading can stand out and if you peel the paint with the masking tape, you gotta do the shading again as well.
Sunny weather always helps to tell the true colors

After the camouflage is completed I stepped in a whole new universe with the Aires Nozzles. Trumpeter made their nozzles with errors, and in order to be good looking, the model need new ones, or one week homework with the Trumpi ones.

Anyway, before adding the nozzles, I painted all bare metal areas so to get the whole aircraft completed for the next step.
Gun area is bare metal…
…as well as the engines and…
…flares

That was all done with Alclad2 paints, and in order to do it, I stripped most of the camouflage with very fine sand paper so to prepare the area for Alclads. They are prettiest-looking metal paints but you definitely need to know what are you doing.

So next, resin nozzles:
blue shades of Alclad2 transparent paint

Without my friend Olivier’s help, I wouldn’t have done it. He is the greatest aircraft modeler I know, and again, A BIG Thank you, Olivier!

He is from Belgium, and he makes a lot of cool stuff. You should check his work out!
So, after doing that, varnishing whole plane with Vallejo gloss and waiting it to cure for couple of days, onto the decals:
Check out:
and