silly puddy for soft lines???

I have used silly putty but I prefer blue tack.

I have used Silly Putty for almost all of my soft camo paint jobs.  It's my go to masking agent.

It might be the way i use it, but i thought silly putty (well, like Snibs, downunder i use Blu-Tack or U-Tack) gave hard lines.

In fact that's what i use it for when i do use it.

For soft line i thought you'd need to do freehand or apply a raised mask?

For  a soft line I use the blue-tak, poster-tac whatever it is going by, and roll it into a long roll (think like rolling pretzel dough although much smaller scale.  I move farther back from the tac and you get a soft edge.  If you make a hard edge with the mast and spray closer you will get a harder line.

John

For hard lines, I use silly putty or blue tac.  For soft lines, I spray freehand.

I use white tac for hard edged camo, but as John said, it can be used for soft edge. But like Chris, I prefer to do my soft edge schemes freehand.

I use Silly Putty for hard edge camo lines. I find it lets me be more creative with the camo effects than doing it free hand. I can basically see what the pattern will be before I apply the paint and make adjustments.

I'm not sure how it would work for soft edge. I suppose it would let you control how far out the overspray goes, but then you would have a point at which there is no overspray and the transition would be obvious. I think you want to do soft edge without the use of masking.

For hard edge, though, Silly Putty is great. Do not use rattle cans with it, however. There is some chemical in the rattle cans that interacts with the Silly Putty and turns it to mush. I seem to recall I have had a similar, but not quite as extreme, experience when I used enamel paint with Silly Putty. But for acrylics, Silly Putty is pretty great stuff.

Now, you will run into a different sort of problem when you use this technique--the lines are so clean and crisp that they look too good. You'll want to either lighten up your paint so that the color differences aren't so stark, spray the paint on in a thinner layer so you don't get the full effect of the darker color, or go over the entire model with a light coat of something to get all the colors to blend in. For a good example of before and after, you could go to my King Tiger Work in Progress in the Armor forum. I have one set of pics with the hard edge camo and then another set after I sprayed over the body of the tank with a lighter color to create a faded effect. It also has the effect of blending the colors some so they look more realistic together. You can control how much "fading" you want to do simply by applying more or less of your top color. You can also "fade" surfaces that would have been exposed more to the sun with this technique. Just spray more over some spots than over others.

To blend stark camo patterns, I either spray heavily thinned Tamiya Buff or apply an oil wash using "MIG German faded tri-color camo oil paint."  

I use it for both hard and soft, mainly with Tamiya acrylics, though I've used it with enamels as well.

The biggest downside for soft lines is that, because it calls for a thicker "roll," the extra weight of the putty can sometimes be a problem, since the adhesion on some paint surfaces is minimal to begin with. But with a little care and patience, it works a treat.

Like cml said it's all on how you use it. As for me I use it for hard edge camo. Here is a hustler I used silly putty on for hard edge