A brief update and request for advice:
Update first. Since my last post, I have primed the majority of the external surfaces using Mr. Surfacer 1200 cut with Mr. Leveling Thinner. No pictures, because it pretty much just looks like a gray fuselage. I did have a few seams that required additional attention. Oh joy.
Now the advice. I am ready to start painting actual colors, and am slightly hung up on the order in which to proceed. As I have mentioned in other post, I have only recently returned to the hobby after 35 is years, and this is the first build that I have undertaken with invasion stripes. On other builds, I have sprayed the overall color first (both have been NMF), and then painted the required unit and theater stripes afterwards. This job is a bit more complicated:
I have spent some time in a graphics program to create a template for cutting the mask to leave the space around the "4" (and the "B" on the other side), as well as a round cutout so that the stripes don't show under the white star. Now my question is the paint order.
Do I paint the stripes first, then mask and paint the gray & olive drab? The advantage here is it will be easier to cover the primer than the olive paint with the white for the stripes. Spray white first, then cover with black... both can be done with thin coats. The tricky part is that unless I am comfortable with black and white over spray into the area to be painted olive, I would need to mask the future olive areas, paint stripes, then mask the stripe area to paint olive/gray. I would need to carefully line up the irregularly shaped horizontal edge with the already painted shapes. Or...
Do I paint the aircraft, then mask off and paint the stripes? Advantage here is that it seems like it will be easier to mask since I can mask off the striped area and I only have to line up the odd shaped horizontal edges once. Define the overall area, spray white, cover white, spray black. The downside is that I am worried about paint build up given that the olive & gray will be harder to cover with the white.
Is that clear? Am I making it more complicated than it needs to be? What do you folks with more experience think?
Thanks in advance,
Blue