Friday, May 18, 2007

Paint your boat


tomskmasked
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
After waffling on about the tugboat being more art than modelling, I have to stop faffing about and get my brushes out and do some painting.

I’m using this as airbrushing practise. If anything goes wrong fixing it won’t be too hard. Even stripping off the paint and starting again would be considerably easier than do this on any model locomotive I build.

Stage one: Paint the hull with satin black.
Stage Two: Paint the top bits white. As there is a huge separation of the colours by the bits to go blue I didn’t bother masking these colours. That worked OK. I did clean the white bits with turps to remove any overspray.

Stage Three: After leaving the paint to harden overnight I masked off everything that didn’t need to be blue. The edge between white and blue was masked with Tamya tape and then everything else was covered with cheaper masking tape and newspaper.

Result: Pretty good. The line between blue and white was really sharp. Tamya tape has a well deserved reputation it appears and I’ll certainly use it again even if it is the most expensive option.

Mind you, spraying might give the best finish, but it’s not nearly as much fun as brush painting. The process just doesn’t seem natural to me. I have to stop and change location (down to the garage), plan well ahead and spend loads of time messing around masking. The spraying itself happens quickly and then I spend nearly as long cleaning the airbrush. And I have to wear a facemask to work. Give me poking models with brushes any day.

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