The conventional scheme suggests light grey overall, I went with Rustoleum metallic silver. This paint isn't usually a problem, it dries smooth and fast.
The humidity plays havoc with it, there was some fogging of the semi gloss finish. The centering rings and nose cone shoulder showed through the body tube!
Rubbing compound evened out the finish. I've done this before with good results. It isn't perfect but a whole lot better than shooting it again.
The "Conventional" paint scheme has you draw hatches and outline the silver paint areas with a black felt pen or with pin stripe paint. It's hard to get a clean, flowing line around a masked paint area. Drawing hatches around a curved surface would be impossible. Sorry Estes, not possible.
Drawing the hatches and other details directly onto the rocket body would've definitely been quite the challenge, but drawing them on clear decal sheet and then apply the decal would be much easier.
ReplyDeleteI do recall reading an article in the magazine Finescale Modeling (from quite some time ago) where the author discussed technique where one used two layers of decals. The first layer would be printed as black outlines (the article being written at the time when colour printers weren't readily available) - which then you masked and painted (using the black outlines as guides) for the colour fills. The second decal would provide any black outline on the markings that go over the colour areas.
Speaking of using clear decal film... Many, many years ago, I had spent a fair amount of time on a model built from the salvageable parts of the Estes USS Enterprise (it fell from the shelf with other models landing atop it -- only one of the nacelles and the saucer were intact or easily repaired -- the rest was bent, crumbled or torn). The pieces were assembled into a single-nacelle destroyer class starship (as seen in the Franz Joseph book "The Starfleet technical Manual"), and the markings were either masked and painted, and the smaller lettering were done using Letraset rub-on lettering. The masking was done using mailing material (the normal paper surface made it easy for me to hand-draw stuff like the larger lettering, which then I cut out with X-acto, and applied the sheet to model like a stencil). Did have to go through a few retries to get things (mostly) right. It wasn't until I'd pretty much done -- that someone asked me why I didn't create all the markings on a sheet of decal film, then apply the markings as if it was a regular production decal... *forehead slap* *facepalm*
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