I’m building Dragon’s USS Momsen. I’m trying to paint the stern deck (helicopter landing pad) with its standard deck colour and white lines\circle that denote the helicopter landing site.
I tried to carefully mask with tape and liquid mask. The tape worked well, but the liquid mask didn’t. I’m going to repaint the whole piece, but is there a better way to mask and paint this area?
I’m going to try to use frisket film this time to mask, but does anyone have any other ideas? Thanks in advance.
Doesn’t your kit come with a decal for those white painted landing lines? My DDG Pinckney does. Of course, Dragon RAISED those lines, so either I have to carefully shave them off to decal, or carefully place decal on the raised lines, or use a paint pen and carefully paint the raised lines with white paint after I paint the overall ship. Option one would be more in scale.
How about painting the deck white, then masking off the lines you want.
Spray the helipad color, then remove the masking to expose the white lines?
[8D]
The Dragon Momsen is the old Panda kit sold as the Churchill. It comes with raised “painting guide” lines on the helipad.
Sand them off or replace the flight deck with some sheet styrene.
Then replace the lines with something like these decals, available from Iron Shipwright
Another take off on the “white-mask-color-unmask” would be to find dry transfer lines, and circles that could be applied to the white deck. These would be pre shaped, and would serve the same function as the masking tape, with just a little less tedium. After the final color is applied, and dry, masking tape can be used to remove the dry transfers, leaving the white to show.
Gold Medal Models do reasonably-priced Naval Ship decals in both 1/350 and 1/700, which include USN-style helo deck markings.
http://goldmm.com/ships/350-1D.htm
http://goldmm.com/ships/700-1D.htm
Problem solved.
Cheers,
Chris.
Thank you all for your tips. I will probably go with the decal route and sand off the raised lines. It looks like some of the decals will have to go over other decals. I’ve never done that before…any problems with that? I do generally use a setting solution over decals, so I assume that will help with overlapping decal film issues. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks again for the quick replies to my post.
Unless you want to go completely insane, go the decal route! BTDT, and there’s just something about round stencils and my lousy eyesight that inevitably yields … asymetrical results, shall we say?
Putting one decal over another should not yield a noticeable hump, but if you’re worried about it, apply a decal solvent like MicroSol or Solvaset to really suck them down, or just trim where they butt up to each other and remove the overlapping bits.