I recently acquired Revells Class 214 in 1:144 - a modern sub, with the purpose of practicing painting black.

Black is a very difficult color to work with, as it really serves it purpose and sucks all light, details and contours out of a model - a challenge faced by all who has tried painting modern sub, german panzer uniforms or an SR71 (its a wingiethingie )

Some time ago I build a Trumpeter 1:144 Kilo class, and was not really happy with the result - recently I did a Fine Molds 1:72 midget IJN type A, and fared somewhat better, but I felt that I could do better than that.

So I got me a Revell 1:144 class 214 submarine - a very modern and potent looking machine intended for export seeing service in Korea, Greece, Pakistan among other nations.

Its big, its black, its relatively simple - so mistakes are easily removed and its just the perfect canvas for experiencing with the black surface of a coated submarine.

While this is a blog, I all so intend it to be a community study in painting black - so all contributions are welcome, and do please show your builds!

I know think Rui (Skipper) is probably working on a feature on how he did his beautiful Sea Wolf - and if the results a satisfactory I will probably condense this blog down to a feature on painting black.

First a little pondering - black in itself serves the purpose of making things hard to see, and on a scale model this is also the case, so we want black to be any other color than black, as the result otherwise will be quite dull and boring - hiding all details on the model.

I think theres 2 ways to approach painting "black" - method one is to base the subject in black, and then afterwards work with postshading, filters, washes etc, and the second is to base it in another color - like blue or brown, and then work with darker grays and thin black to achieve what we are aiming at.

I will go for the second method, using brown colors as a base, as this sub is coated in a rubberlike material.

More on than in the next post.

Cheers/Jan

Ok, heres the boat in question - why its cast in black plastic I don´t know, but its quite annoying as it both somewhat brittle and very hard to see any cracks or imperfections:

Nice one Jan, be interesting to see how you get a genuine "black" look.
Julian

Black styrene sucks bigtime when it comes to filling and sanding - which the first passes with browns painfully showed

Anyway - darker brown - hullred like - for the bottom hull and a lighter one for the upper hull, tying to imitate the bleaching by sun and discolloration from being in the water:



On ThyssenKrupp theres a high resolution of the picture which is used by Revell for the boxart - the picture can be downloaded right here !

On Military-today theres a series of pictures of the 214 class, one of which shows it on the yard - a interesting picture not only showing the variaty of "black" but allso some heavy discoloration from rust, see the picture here