Those are some great lookin' geeps, Larry!
Originally posted by brakie
....I thought about painting that part of the hood black but that would show up even worst...
I beg to differ with you on this point, though...
Give the black paint a try!
Many years ago, I spent a summer as a carpenter/set builder for a theater company...
Most of my job consisted of building 2 dimentional "backscenes"...bushes, trees, buildings, etc, made from plywood & timber framing, that were painted by a set painter.
At one point, I expressed concern to the painter that some of the bare wood was going to be visible from the front of the stage.
His response was, "Paint it black, then it's invisible."
This sounded kind of goofy to me at the time...What I didn't realize was that this guy was an artist, & understood the basic science of color...that is - black absorbs light, colors reflect it.
In other words, a viewer's eye is going to be drawn away from the black, & only sees the color...the black simply becomes, to the viewer's eye, shadowy spaces between colors.
This little piece of advice has paid off again & again in the context of my model railroading...if there's some unmodeled area where you don't want a viewer's eye latching onto...interiors, etc...black paint will hide such elements.
Here's an example on my own layout...
This is a shot of an open loading dock door. The "interior" of the structure is nothing more than 2 pieces of styrene...a horizontal "floor" under the figure, & a vertical "wall" behind it.
By painting the styrene black, the viewer doesn't spot the fake...hopefully, they only see the figure & the barrel, & discount the rest as the shadowy interior of a building.