1:48 Su-25M1/Su-25UBM1 Frogfoot Ukrainian Digital Camo Paint Mask Set

A ground-attack aircraft that hid in little squares

The Su-25 came about as a simple and resilient support aircraft with an armored bathtub around the pilot and the ability to land on a field surface. Ukrainian workshops kept both the single-seat machines and the two-seaters in service, in which the rear cockpit originally served for training. Sometime after 2010 part of the fleet received a finish made up of rectangular fields that breaks the outline into dozens of small patches - a pattern that until then had appeared on uniforms rather than on wings.

A hundred small edges instead of five large ones

From the masking point of view a pixel pattern is a completely different task than a flowing camouflage. The total length of the edges is many times greater, and every extra centimeter is another opportunity for the paint to get under the edge. That is why you spray from a greater distance, at low pressure and in several very thin passes; one generous dose will make a puddle under the film.

In sections and with a system

The model is divided into sections and each one is finished separately, so that the stencils do not lie on a finished surface longer than necessary. Keep the parts you lift in the order in which they came off the sheet; with a pixel pattern it is easy to mix up two similar squares and you only discover the error on the finished machine.

Once the masks are off, the sharp geometry is emphasized further as soon as the model is given a coat of semi-matte varnish, which evens out the gloss between the individual fields. Until then every freshly uncovered square carries a gloss of its own depending on how many layers lay over it, and the surface looks restless.