Donatas' foamies are really nice and it shows in his work how much fun he has with them. I love to do nice paint schemes on my planes and have spent countless hours over the years with an iron & heat gun, or a pile of spray cans and a roll of masking tape. The one thing I never really did was to get 'artsy' and do something unconventional. It was either scale detailing with emblems and logos, or it was basic graphics with nice lines and colors.
The great thing about building foamies is they are easy to finish and the materials are cheap and easy to work with. They are also a nice flat surface to work on without too many compound curves. Basically, they are a great canvas!
So when I started on my DW Foamies Yak 54 I wanted to do something a bit more wild and fun. I'm not entirely sure where the inspiration came from but I decided on a Tiger Stripes theme. When I went out looking for good samples of tiger stripes, I came across a bunch of cool face shots of tigers and it occurred to me how cool one would look on a wing. Long story short, I found a nice graphic-style image I could use as a base and go from there.
The surprising thing in all of this so far has not been the details or masking work, it was finding a can of Orange foam safe paint
. My trusty True Value hardware store that always has Krylon Shortcuts and H2O in stock didn't have anything close. I finally found some Glow Orange made by Plasticote at Walmart and figured at least it'll be bright!
I planned out how I would spray the Orange on using the printed image as a masking stencil. I figured that since this is a very stylized, graphic image I could take whatever 'artistic' liberties I needed to get it done and imperfections add character. There isn't anything real mysterious to the process beyond the photos I took along the way. I still have a ways to go with more of the details and fuselage but I am started and the hard part, as it seems, is done. I'll keep adding some pics as it is finished. Enjoy!