Honestly, it’s the most important one! Especially now that we’re coming into summer, the first one went down faster than a fat lady riding solo on a see-saw 
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Painting: Liquid Mask for those Hard-to-Reach Places…
Back on our Panther grind, and one of the findings from our first experimental green pass was that hard-to-reach places created by my somewhat undisciplined assembly had created an excess of paint diffusion particularly between the side-skirts and the upper hull. To remedy, I’ve used a liquid mask - In this case KillerBody Precision Mask. This is an acrylic product aimed more at the RC Car market, where body painting is done by meticulously applying paint to the inside face of a clear plastic body so that the paintwork doesn’t get damaged by whatever environment you’re driving your car through.
The product has a very deep blue colour and a thick consistency more like honey than paint. I took a bit of a chance and applied it directly to the model, joining up the camo lines on the skirting with the camo lines on top of the hull. Once sufficient coverage was acheived, the balance was masked with Tamiya masking tape
We wanted to give our liquid mask time to set, so moved onto the turret continuing our paper masking. This time around I’ve done away with the masking tape spacers as I’ve found them to cause more problems than they solve. Although the edge relief is welcome, I found the relief provided was inconsistent and occasionally masked areas which should have been subject to that relief diffusion leaving evidence of their being after removal
After letting the paint dry overnight, we returned the following afternoon to peel off the liquid mask. Unfortunately our painted-on application was too thin for the product to peel off and after a brief moment of panic we proceeded to scrub it off with a toothbrush under running water in the sink. The dry Tamiya acrylic paint held up to the abuse, and the masking medium and its threat of blue stain were washed away leaving our linework as intended.
Any lifted paint simply went back to the dark yellow undercoat, which didn’t look out of place given that’s the “factory setting”. You’ll probably notice a couple of areas of overspray owing to some user error, poor mask discipline and some paint consistency issues but lessons were very much learned on this pass. I’m not terribly concerned about these errors since the dark yellow is supposed to go down first, and the other colours follow. These masks were deliberately cut 1-2mm smaller to ensure that the red and green get proper coverage and diffusion over the yellow without coming up short.
I’m quite pleased how this is turning out, with good planning and measurement of the masking leaving a remarkably consistent alignment between hull and turret despite being masked and painted a week apart
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Looks good,getting camo to look right on 1/48 isnt easy
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Thanks Tojo, it’s a process! Part of me feels like I’m doing this on hard mode, but since Tamiya went to the trouble of coordinating where the colours meet in their reference facings I thought I should make the effort… I’m sure there are easier ways to go about it, but everything I’ve read about putty masks leads to tales of stains and icky residues
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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
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Congratulations on your son! Im glad everything went well and he is heathy after all of that.
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Congratulations on the birth of your son…glad he has overcome his medical issues. You masking tricks led to a fantastic camo job! I’m amazed you found the time to accomplish this with all you had going on. Great work!
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Congrats on your 1:1 scaled masterpiece.!
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Painting: Diffusion between hard mask edges and colouring within the lines…
@Demolition @mrb865 @waikong … Thanks for your well wishes! And @waikong that’s certainly one way to put it 
Small update today, completing our Tamiya XF-64 Red-Brown Coat to the turret. This time I’ve done minimal masking, as I’ve now got a fair idea where the linework needs to be. I’ve just applied enough masking to set “bookmarks” to ensure that the camo shapes on the turret line up with the hull when our turret is in the neutral position.
We also went back over some of our hull areas, gently freehanding the interface between some of those colours where the masking had created a “harder” edge than I’d hoped for. This required a very low pressure on the airbrush, as I wasn’t trying to paint the model so much as create that “diffusion” effect of a sprayed-on camoflage
Just the major touchup of the green left to do, and a few hits of other colours to correct some oversprayed areas and I’ll call the base-coating done!
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Seems like you spent almost as much time creating this excellent log as you did building the kit! Both are very impressive.
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