Rifle Troubles

As I’ve progressed through the painting of this project all kinds of stupid problems have cropped up. Masks lifting up and getting painted under, paint chipping, all kinds of bad surface scratches cropping up, etc. Really, some parts of this model are a real mess. But whatcha gonna do? Put another 100 hours into fixing the stupid thing? Nah, I’m ready to move on. But I’m finally in the home stretch, for real. Everything’s glossed, and I’m about to put the decals on it. It should be a lot of fun. One of the last big efforts I put into the paintjob was the rifles: All my other projects, the guns were just a one-color paintjob. This time around I wanted to use a few different colors to play with the details of the weapons. I messed up the surface here and there, cutting too deep with the knife when cutting the masking tape, but I think the overall effect is good. Then I lifted the liquid mask off the already-green camera eyes and… well, you’ll see. It was a mess, so I decided rather than masking and painting those stupid cameras again (which I’d never really managed to get properly smooth in the first place) I’d just replace them with cut rectangular pieces of clear plastic, and paint the back-faces of these fluorescent green. It’s something I picked up from Fichtenfoo’s Website. I didn’t try it before because I’m generally not so good with the precision shape-cutting, but in retrospect is really is easier most of the time than other methods.