I would like to give my Carenado Cessna Skymaster the paint from the Skymaster used in the Stephen King movie Night Flier. This is an addapted paint from a military version of the Skymaster, all black with some of the red markings on it.

My problem being that everything I tried so far resulted in an aircraft that shows like a silhouette with windows against the sky colors and all detail of the aircraft is lost.

What can I do to create a black paint that still shows the detail of the aircraft?

Use dark gray instead.  This is what modellers call "scale black."  It looks awfully light until you get it on a scale model, where it looks very natural.  You'll have to experiment to find a good color to use.

 

Edit:  found a good example:

 

http://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Airbrush/Floquil/Military-Model/Scale-Black/Scale-Black.html

 

Hook

Thanks Larry, I'm gonna give it a try.

I'm still having problems creating the black paint.

In Photoshop I created a layer with all the parts that needed to be colored black and lightened the layer with a Hard Light setting and Opacity of 92%(this to make the seems and rivets visible again), creating a grey that was to the eye similar to the scale black from the example. The result, though, was a dark grey, almost black, but looking over it, there are a lot of black speckles in the paint. Also the paint turns to a true grey when the light glances over it from a certain angle.

So I turned up the Opacity to 93%, which gives me a very nice black, without speckles, but again with the problem of almost getting a silhouette with windows...

That 1% difference is enough to go from too light, to too dark.

I tried different setting for the overlay lighting, but all the options that come within the range of giving me a scale black have the same effect. With 1% difference from too light to too dark.

 

Anyone who can advise me on some techniques in Photoshop for getting the right overlay?

I tried to make a suitable picture to show the effect, but seeing the picture in Photoshop, it's so much lighter that it's grey...

Even in Windows Photo Viewer, which normally shows picture much too dark, the paint is a lot lighter than in P3D.

 

I think it's not the paint that needs adjusting, but P3D.

I am using a black layer at 85% opacity. The chances are that the little speckles are from the spec maps?