Xīn lóng International Airport - T2 Painting

Since my last update, a month ago, there has been loads of progress on the new terminal, far more than can be covered in one entry in fact. So for now we'll take a look at painting progress and I promise to do more frequent updates to keep pace with construction. In this part we get stuck into the painting and spruce up the terminal.

We left off at the last part with the masking tape deployed to begin painting of the gate spaces. This involves using the colour palette that I had created for Xin Long's first terminal. So this entry bares a close similarity to the similar entry for terminal one when I painted that way back in July 2015.

The primary base colour for the gates is once again Tamiya's Neutral Grey Flat XF53, which looks lighter on the MDF than the paint suggests it might. To break up the space to make it look more used plus because I was running out of XF53 I used Humbrol's No27: Matt Sea Grey to colour several of the gate spaces. In this way I hope to make it look like the gate areas have had their surfaces relayed at some point.

You can also see in the photo above how the terminal piers connect together after initial masking of the separate sections.

The next step was painting the taxiway surfaces and again I fell back on similar colours as before. Humbrol's No32: Dark Matt Grey is great for asphalt style surfaces whilst Tamiya's XF22 RLM Grey gives a nice contrast for the inner taxiways.

Cross hatching the whole area using an HB pencil to simulate the concrete blockwork adds a level of reality I like a lot.

The existing terminal building also needed an update. This had originally been built for my old 1/600 scale airport Imogenia out of card but was looking a bit tired. I refreshed the surfaces and added new signage to make it suitable for Xin Long. There is still plenty of work to be done on the terminals and piers however including connectors to create a seamless building design.

Lastly for this entry the piers got a first coat of paint (using Humbrol 27) and I got the paint pens out again to began the detailing with the white outline around gate areas and some of the road network. It's amazing how fast this kind of construction can happen and in literally a couple of afternoons one weekend the new terminal is looking about 40% complete. There's plenty of updates coming in the next few parts covering the gate markings, terminal additions, a new background and trees!