Masking
It's finally time for the hard part. It's time to paint in the details for this sucker.
My goal here is to paint in the hexagons with metallic blue. A smart man would hand paint them with a regular brush. Unfortunately, I am not a smart man.
I started out using the 6mm tape and cut them into small rectangular and triangle pieces. I then applied them one by one to the edges of the areas I don't want the paint to get on.
With each piece of tape, I felt my soul shedding away...
After I covered all the edges, I masked the general areas using bigger and cheaper generic brand tapes.
After about 3 hours working on this, both pieces were ready for painting.
Airbrushing
I first wanted to start out by top coating the feathers that I painted last time. I've been trying to decide between a glossy finish and a matte finish but eventually I decided I'll give glossy finish a try first. If I don't like the glossy look on the feathers, I can later add the clear matte varnish on top.
The photo above shows how the feather looks before the top coat. When applying clear coat, the transparent color makes it hard to tell if you've applied sufficient amount. If you apply too little, you get a bumpy splatter texture. If you apply too much, you can end up with drippy texture. The goal is to apply the top coat just enough to make the surface look wet and glossy. The right balance is a bit hard to find at first but I think I got it right this time.
At first, the wet layer looked like it's a bit much and is covering the detailed textures but it dried out in a much more thin layer and with an event texture.
The feathers look nice and glossy but it doesn't feel like it has a visible overbearing layer of coating on top.
Now, it was finally time to move on to the disaster that was just waiting to happen.
As mentioned previously, our goal here is to have these details painted metallic blue. For metallic colors, however, I don't want to go straight into painting with the metallic paint. I first want to paint it with Tamiya black (glossy).
Oh boy, there's no turning back now...
After the black paint on the actual piece I'm working with dried, I painted it with Tamiya metallic blue.
The reason I colored it black first is because having a glossy black surface underneath helps emphasize the reflective properties of the metal flakes in the metallic paint (think about how windows into a dark room looks like a mirror if you shine light on the glass from the outside).
In the photo above, the plastic spoon is painted black before the metallic blue is applied. The part that has been marked on the photo is where I've accidentally rubbed off the black paint before it was fully dried. You can see that the metal flakes inside the paint are less visible on the patch of area without black paint underneath.
Once the paint dried, it was time to see how everything turned out.
I took some tweezers and started slowly unmasking one piece of tape at a time.
Surprisingly, that didn't turn out so bad. There were some smidges on one side but all in all, I was pretty happy how it came out in the end. It much cleaner than I expected.
On to the other piece...
CLEAN AS F$@#!!!
I may consider trying to fix up that one imperfection by hand brushing but I don't think it'll be too bad if I left it as is.
Today I Learned
- Even if the stickiness of a masking tape seems a bit questionable (as in it moves around if you apply a little pressure to it), as long as the tape is properly covering the edges with no bubbles and openings, it will do its job
- Gotta make extra caution sealing the gaps and bubbles where two masking tapes overlap or the paint will seep through
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