I’m new to building models and im going to start work on a few zoids plastic kits.
I had originally planned to remove every piece from their runner and file down the outcrops then start on the airbrushing.
Someone mentioned to me that i should just air brush them while they are still in the runners to make life easy, then remove, file, and touchup with a quick sprits from the airbrush again. Anyone have any experience doing it this method, or does the monotony of doing everything individually tend to look much better?
I would think that you would not only want to remove the parts from the sprue,but you would assemble most of the kit or the sub-assembly before painting.
after assembly you would clean up the seams and then paint.
Also don’t remove the parts from the sprue until you are ready to use them !!
Yes and yes. Some of each. One of the major steps early in kitbuilding is examining the kit and deciding which parts get painted by themselves, which are painted as subassemblies and how much to paint of the almost fully assembled model. It varies from kit to kit. Each kit is unique. If two parts will have a big seam running along the assembly, that seam may need to be sanded/filed after assembly, in which case no sense painting those pieces individually. How hard are masking some parts on a subassembly or final assembly? Sometimes on smaller parts you can paint them on the sprue, and merely touch up the small sprue attachment spot when you cut it away from the sprue. You need to examine the parts and think ahead. Good early planning makes for a more enjoyable build, with fewer hair-tearing moments.
One major gripe is that too many manufacturers do not do this when they design the kit. You get the feeling that even if they supply color info, they feel few modelers bother to paint their kits anyway. They should, especially on expensive kits, do some of this planning when they design the kit, and advise you in the instructions. In many cases in multi-color finishes, they could design the molding so that different colors are on different parts, with color lines not running through the part.
As Don mentioned, it varies a lot. I like to paint on the sprue as much as possible as you don’t have to worry about holding it, clamping it, blu-tak’ing it, or any other method of securing it while painting. Unfortunately precious few parts can be painted this way. Most require some fitting, sanding, and seam work. The only parts that are (IMHO) good candidates are single-piece parts that won’t have a seam to worry about, where the sprue gate is either hidden or on an edge, and they’re not part of a subassembly that gets uniformly painted.
Example: on the P-47 I’m working on, the landing gear bay base coats (yellow zinc chromate) were easily painted while the wing halves were on the sprue. Same for the inside landing gear doors, but not the other side. When it comes time to paint the airframe, I’ll stick the landing gear doors to the bays with tape or blu tak to naturally mask the bays and door inner faces, and paint the outside of the door uniformly with the rest of the airframe.
Painting on the sprue can be a convenience and a time saver, but make sure you’re not doing extra work later because of seams or subassemblies.
I used to paint the exterior while on sprues, but now paint after assembly, to Don’s point on seams… One thing of which to be aware: paint on the gluing surface will prevent solvent type glues from working. Sand off the paint before gluing or use super glue.
Super glue (CA) doesn’t work either. It bonds to the paint, but the bond between plastic and paint is not really strong enough to count on for gluing parts together. I scrape the paint off with an X-acto knife. Since that dulls blades rapidly, I keep a second knife handle on my bench with blades I removed from my primary knife. The blade I remove from knife #1 then goes into my “scraping” knife. For attaching really small parts I just drill into the part I will be attaching to with a small drill in a pin vise.
BTW, I also use the scraping knife for smoothing some seams. I hold the blade at 90 degrees to surface and pull the knife along the seam.