The truth beneath the mask!

To each event there has to be a "before" and an "after". On the right is the body parts before I removed the masks. Three layers each of white, yellow and green and hopefully well placed masks will make or break the model. The previous post showed that my stress level was on the rise and tonight I was asking myself how to peel the tape without damaging the paint. After all there is no magical piece of string to pull to do the trick. I started with the easy ones: the yellow stripes. As the tapes were only wrapped in the inside of the body, it was easy to find a free end on which to pull. The border of the tapes did not create any mess and I have a sharp line between yellow and green. To my surprise there was no leak of paint at the corners or junctions between parts, only little lines with no consequences.

The tape around the "mouth" was as easily removed as the other ones. There is a small leak on the bottom side where the tape overlapped itself. The rounded end near the white dot looks crisp and the thin green separating line does not seem to create any problem. Finally, there was no trace of unwanted over-spray through the seams of the mask: every yellow area is the right colour!
I removed the round masks by lifting the border with my nail. I was not pressing too much onto the tape so as not to damage the paint beneath, and did not try to lift it directly at the border so as not to break the small accumulation of paint. No problem at all for all three areas.

The general look of the job is very enjoyable, at least for someone like me who had close to no experience with spray painting. I cannot believe I achieved such a result without more problems... The end result however looks a bit off. It is as if the masks were not correctly placed along the axis of the parts, but depending on the point of view, this seems to be more or less obvious.






Of course there is some touching up in the pipeline. For whatever reason, part of the round tape on the nose was soaked by yellow paint and the mess is worryingly thick. I had to sand the area a bit and added some white paint over it (the same white spray paint put into a small plastic lid and applied with a brush). Some borders between colours need to be cleared a little. Those were fixed with a toothpick in the same way as when I pushed the tapes back while placing them. The leaks there are so thin that they are removed with no fuss at all. Finally, the left hand side round spot has a little yellow stain. It is weird since the stain is far from the border of the tape. My guess is that the tape was scratched at that very spot and lost its waterproof properties. Anyway it was soon forgotten thanks to some wet sanding with a 3000 grit abrasive pad.

So I just have to wait for my white touch-ups to dry, sand them a bit, add paint if necessary and decide when the body is ready for a finishing stage. I will soon make trials with clear coats on the Europa parts and see how that works with sanding marks and decals.