Painting: Babies and Hobby don’t mix… But Baking and Hobby does!
It’s been a little while since updates, as my son decided to enter the world 6 weeks earlier than expected which unfortunately meant he was 9 weeks gestationally premature weighing 1.97kg (or 4.34lb in Freedom Units). Fortunately the only complications we’ve had were predictable the side-effects of his prematurity and we were able to get him home from the NICU and Special Care Unit a couple of days before Christmas
While on paternity leave, I’ve finally found some time to get our next layer of masked colour on. We’ve done masked applications of the Olive-Green and Dark Yellow, so we’re now up to the Red-Brown layer. My linework has deviated slightly from the original pattern, so masks taken strictly from our scaled instruction booklet would run a risk of slight miscloses to what’s actually on the model. To this end we’ve experimented with creating masks from actual photos of the model and then using baking paper against a backlit computer monitor to create the masks
This was somewhat effective, however I found the non-stick properties of the baking paper also applied to the Tamiya masking tape. About a third of the way through the masking process I was just using the baking paper tracings to transfer the required linework to normal printer paper, which behaved much better on the model.
A few areas still exhibited excess relief once the hull was wrapped up, but we pressed down the edges of the mask either with fingers or the nearest hobby tool available if fingers were too imprecise. Note that I’d abandoned the Liquid Mask as used in previous steps. I’d found I had a few spots of the vivid blue liquid mask that refused to budge, so I resolved to presevere with masking tape and wadding around those more awkward areas.
Unfortunately some overspray from our Dark Yellow application prompted a more aggressive approach to masking, so this time we left nothing exposed that we wouldn’t want the red-brown paint to touch.
We came out with a much tidier result, thanks to very thorough mask coverage to mitigate overspray risk as well as a much more patient approach with the airbursh to ensure no surprise outbursts that would cause paint to escape under the paper masking.
We just need to repeat this process on the turret and then make a final application of the Olive Green to clean up a few residual mistakes, pattern miscloses and finish inconsistencies