Revell 1/144 Northrop Grumman E-2C Hawkeye Part 2

For the people who have actually read the other parts of my blog they will know that I started a Revell 1/144 scale Northrop Grumman E-2C Hawkeye sometime last summer and all of the trouble I have had with it up until this point.  Well below is a picture of it semi-dry fitted

Thats it before I started to paint the main plane and attach the canopy to it.  At this point only the main wings and the tailplane are glued to the fuselage.  The Rotordome and it's struts are not glued yet as I think it'll be easier to set the decals for the walkways on without having to navigate my way around those strut legs.

  If you look at the dark grey bits below the rotordomes shadow you will see the Walkways which I speak of and know why they would be easier to attach before the rotordome is glued in place.  I also think thats an Hawkeye E-2D (aka Hawkeye 2000) as opposed to the E-2C I am doing, but that matters not.  Anyhow, I moved onto painting this little one, now for some unknown reason and as far as I can tell, Revell only give the numbers for their paints and they are always something stupid like 97.35% Matt 8 with 2.65% Matt 5 hardly ever a single colour.  Well this one asked me to mix white in with a light grey which I done and well to me it looked too dark.  To me all the Hawkeyes look a little white with a very fine little grey in them.  So I had to take the paint off, luckly it hadn't cured yet so I could use white spirit to wipe it off.  The picture below kinda shows you how well their colours come out.

You can just see a bit of it between the fuselage and the left wing engine.  What you can also see is my well painted arrestor hook.  Cool no?!  Anyhow that colour didn't work either, so I tried a little more white in the mix this time, still no joy as you'll see soon below.  So I have been on the search for a light enough grey when shopping around for a colour for my Hawk Mk.100 I noticed it gave an FS number, which to my understanding means "federal standard" (please correct me if I am wrong).  Anyhow the Hawk uses a colour called Light Ghost Grey from ModelMaster I thought I might be in luck there, I tried it on my Hawk, and altho I love the paint now, it was still too grey.  However looking around on the interwebs, I found another modeller who used Light Gull Grey, I have ordered that and will try putting that on.  I'm also debating if I should use the standard decals that come with it or not... still not sure...

Do you see what I mean about the grey being too dark?  If it was an F-15 or an F-16, no problems but it just seems... wrong to me.

Anyhow I've received my Light Gull Grey paint now with two other greys as I am now painting quite a few grey models.  Lets hope I can actually finish this model this year eh?  more to come...

  Peace!

  Dazz