This is my B-17 project. Last fall I had an opportunity to visit the Imperial War Museum in Duxford England and walk around their flying B-17 “Sally B” and the static B-17 they have in the American Air Museum portion  that is fairly “Weathered”.  It inspired me to play with weathering an olive drab B-17 (and several other kits after this)  I built the kit straight out of the box as I was really concentrating on what I could do with the paint and weathering. This kit has been around a hundred years so I won’t bother with the build.

Model Master enamel was the primary paint used.  I started with standard Olive drab lightened considerably with Khaki and sprayed the entire plane. I then mixed a slightly darker batch of the same formula and spayed the plane concentrating on the center areas of most of the panels.  At this point I masked off all the fabric control surfaces since most of the color photos I have of B-17’s show these as being much lighter than the rest of the plane. 

I then hit the entire plane with Oil drab right out of the bottle concentrating on the panel lines mainly but I did shade some complete panel.  From here I gradually started introducing black into the mixture making sure the differences between shades was very subtle. In all I followed this process about 8 times until I was satisfied with the effect.  I left the plane for about an hour to set up before starting the exhaust stains top and bottom. For this I used Floquil dirty black with the air brush. This mixture makes a perfect shade of grimy exhaust.  I finished it up with some light tan streaks (very lightly) around two of the engine cowlings only (outer star board and inner port).  I finished with the paint by mixing some dark olive drab and brush painted some random patch repairs on some of the fabric control surfaces and a lighter mixture for the metal areas.  A little chipping with some silver it was ready for a coat of Future and some decals (again straight from the kit). I then sprayed the entire plane with Humbrol Matt Varnish and it was ready for the standard oil wash using Burnt Umber.

Ron