I found some pics of the paint process that I forgot to include so I’ll take a step back.
After I got the decals from the printer…..
…..I made masks that matched the contour of the stripes on the Ultradomes. I drew them in Inkscape and then printed them. I cut them out and taped them to strips of frog tape which gave me perfectly sized masks for each of the four sides of the cars.
The cars were painted in base coat of Rustoleum white primer and then several coats of Vallejo white. Once the masks were applied I shot another coat of white to seal the tape. This was very important as the decal stripes could mask any imperfections on the bottom edge but the top edge would be right there in your face.
The result after shooting the blue was exactly what. Had hoped for.
Ok that’s all for paint.
On to todays progress…. Windows!
Back on another project
@CNR5529 suggested we experiment with theatre gels for windows. They come in a multitude of colours including several smokey/ black tints that really do a great job of simulating window tint.
On this model I don’t want the top windows to be see through so I went with the darker of the two colours I had.
I started by cutting long strips of theatre gels equal to the widths of the windows. Those were taped down as straight and parallel as I could. This is very important. Once taped down I then laid perpendicular strips of tape equal to the height of the windows. This gave me a grid of about 100 windows.
I cut that grid apart into strips which held 5 individual windows that in theory were all the same size… and they mostly are.
In the future if I do this again I’ll use less sticky tape. I used frog tape and I ended of creasing a lot of windows trying to remove them. In the future I’d likely use cheap green painters tape which has a lot less grip.
For the application I used canopy glue. I put a bit on the window space and spread it around. I found at first that I had to hold windows in place for a long time. The result was better when I let it tack up a bit for maybe 3-4 minutes. I did this through out the day and found that my giant puddle of glue I accidentally poured thickened up and then it got really easy to apply the windows and I didn’t have to hood them at all. So in the future I’ll pour out some glue and let sit for some time before starting the application process.
And that’s it so far. I have one side of both cars done. I still need to do the other two sides and cut custom widths for the larger side/end windows, and the odd shaped ones on the actual ends of the cars.
Thanks for checking in.
Craig.
