Having made our cockpit, we must now paint it. I use a method I learned from a modeller at our local club that I'm sure many of you will have heard of, Phil Stuchinkas. It works for anything, not just interiors, but can really be used to great effect inside tanks & aircraft. Basically you use at least three shades of your basic colour, starting with a dark shade that you spray over the entire interior. After that, you apply the lighter shades over the more visible areas, leaving the recesses, corners etc in the darker shade. These lighter coats should just be "misted" on, and the technique takes a little practise, but the results are excellent. Basically you are artificially creating areas of light and shadow that don't occur in models the same way they do in full-size objects. You can be more obvious (or heavy-handed!) In 1/72nd scale as you will be able to see much less of your handiwork when the model is closed, and the smaller scales require more artificial creation than larger ones.

Onto this base of artificial shadow shading (in acrylic, by the way), you can apply the washes you want. Mix a small quantity of oil paint (the reason you use oils rather than enamels is that oils are transparent rather than particulate) with white spirit until you have the colour density you require, then brush neat white spirit over your cockpit. Onto the wet cockpit, flow the wash into the areas you want to highlight - the depressions in the detail will draw the colour down, the white spirit lowering the surface tension and facilitating this process. When happy with the wash, leave to dry thoroughly.

NOTE: This will only work with an acrylic base: an enamel base will absorb the white spirit and form creases and lift from the plastic. If you are using enamels, try using transparent water colour paints for the wash.

When dry, give the cockpit a light dry-brush with an enamel paint a shade or two lighter than your lightest base coat. I find enamels dry-brush better than acrylics, but this is a matter of personal taste, and some people may find acrylics work better for this stage. Make sure you don't overdo this stage - it's easy to get too much paint on your brush and ruin all your work so far. It's far better to have four or five goes at the cockpit with virtually no paint on your brush and gradually build up the effect than to try to do it all in one go and end up with a nasty streak across part of your cockpit.

Next I hand-brush the detail such as ejection seat handles, switches, coloured dials etc with a fine brush (Brush sizes, although supposed to be standard, vary quite a bit - I use a variety of brushes, the important thing being they will hold paint and form a pin-sharp point. Their supposed sizes range from 0 to 00000!!!)

Last of all, and not in all cases, I dry brush a small amount of matt aluminium or silver around areas that would receive operational wear, this varying with the age and condition of the aircraft I am modelling. This should leave me with a cockpit (or sections thereof) that is fully painted and requires little or no work to finish (examples of extra work being addition of Remove Before Flight tags, pilot figures, straps dangling out of the cockpit etc).