Middle East Air Forces - 4x 17ml

Camouflage over Sinai and the Golan

The air wars in the Middle East brought schemes from the 1960s on that you will not find anywhere else. Israeli Mirage III and Skyhawk aircraft received a three-color desert finish of sand, brown and olive fields, Egyptian and Syrian MiGs carried pale sandy upper surfaces over a blue-gray underside, and Iraqi machines mixed the two approaches. Harsh sun and ever-present dust bleached the shades quickly, so two aircraft of the same squadron looked noticeably different after half a year of service.

Box contents

Four bottles of 17 ml each hold water-thinnable acrylic paint. The consistency is set for spraying, and once thinned with a product from the same brand the paint passes even through a nozzle of about 0.2 mm without grain. A brush handles it too, though it is wiser to cover in two thinner passes rather than one heavy coat, which would flood the fine relief of rivets and panel lines.

How to get the result

Desert tones have low covering power, so a light base underneath is worth it. On Israeli machines the boundaries of the fields were usually sprayed with a soft transition, while on some Soviet types they were masked to a hard edge instead, so one set covers both schools of application. Once dry, let the surface rest for a few hours; only then comes the gloss intermediate coat under the decals and the final knocking back with pigment. Anyone building a machine from a particular war does well to find the subject on a period photograph, because the same squadron flew in different periods with differently saturated finishes, and the difference is usually greater than you would expect.