Eduard 1/144 Me 109 G-6 - Part 8

Panel line detailing with charcoal
One of the advantages of being off work for a couple of days with a stomach bug (to put it mildly) is that I have had time to do a wee bit of model stuff between trips to the bathroom!

The Eduard Me 109 has quite deep panel line details - in fact some online reviews note that these 'features' are a little too deep - and I wanted to use these for trying out a technique I read about. I am using some charcoal filings to dust into the grooves and seam lines of my aircraft.

Above: I use a cheap nail file to sand off the charcoal stick's granules, then apply
them to the model's seam lines sing a nice pointy brush.

Now a couple of things. First of all this technique is normally done using artists Conte crayons and not charcoal. These two art mediums a distant relative but charcoal is a lot more messy and tends to spread around a lot more - Conte granules being a little more stable. But unfortunately in my hometown the last proper art store closed last year and proper Conte crayons were not available to me - this time.

Charcoal tends to go everywhere - and you end up with your fingers covered in the dust, so you have to be careful that you do not end up with unwanted finger prints on your model. luckily, however, if you do this work on top of a thin gloss varnish layer as I have the dust is easy to erase with an artists putty rubber or BluTac.

I know this is just a small stage on from my last report about this project but I thought the technique was interesting enough to warrant it's own post. Judge for yourself how effective it was - though, as usual, as a newbie I have probably exaggerated the effect...