Revell’s 1/48 F/A-18E Super Hornet- The Hornet Has Stickers

I finally got around to applying the decals to the Super Bug. I used a set from Super Scale, and I wasn’t really impressed with it.

While the decals behaved well, settling down nicely with some Solvaset, the quality of the art was poor. Very grainy, almost like an image that has been scaled up. To top that off, the instructions for decal placement were very poor, with only a vague outline of some of the stencil shapes illustrated, leaving me to figure out which decal was shaped about like the placement guide’s instructions. Several decals that were on the section of the sheet for this aircraft did not turn up on the instructions at all, and several on the instructions were not on the sheet. (Oddly, the more colorful decals for another squadron’s aircraft looked very sharp.)

I turned to the Revell kit decals for a few additional stencils, but those decals were very poor. They were the “dot matrix” type, with everything appearing as tiny dots. Because there is such low contrast between the gray stencils and the gray paint, I used them anyway, as some of the poor quality disappears in a sea of gray.

I realized how spoiled I am from using Cartograph decals.

I need to tone down the slime lights a bit, and then add another gloss coat to prep the surface for a wash. Despite the poor quality of the decals, I think it will look OK from normal viewing distances. Plus, I still have some weathering to do, so that will probably make them look about right.