Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Painting Squad Symbols On A Rhino

I’ve always fancied squad markings on the top hatch of Rhino’s.  I’m not entirely sure why, but they’ve always seems fitting.  So naturally that what I want to do with my Rhino’s.  The unfortunate reality is that I can’t free hand paint worth a damn.  Here’s one solution that I came up with, it’s probably not new, but it works really well.

Scotch Tape is a great thing…

rhino hatch (1)

Here I masked off the area in the shape of a tactical squads arrow.  I made sure that the very inner edges were pressed flat to keep any paint from running underneath.  If you try this you can tell that you have good adhesion when the tape is nearly transparent.  Since I wanted my arrow to be white, in this step I filled in the area with Codex Grey.

rhino hatch (2)

 I used Fortress Grey in this step to help make it easier to paint on the white.

rhino hatch (3)

I forgot to take a picture in between painting on the white and this step, but I’m sure you’ll be able to fill in the blank.  After painting on the white I pealed the tape back to nice crisp lines.  Sadly I also discovered that my arrow was slightly off.  So I again used some Scotch Tape were I needed to make corrections.

rhino hatch (final)

Here’s my WIP Rhino with the hatch.  Overall it came out pretty nice.  While doing this though I had a stroke of madness and thought up a crazy idea for the second Rhino.  Which may end up being repeated here depending on how well it turns out, but you’ll have to check back after the holidays to see.  ;)

Happy Holidays everyone.  Cheers!

6 comments:

  1. That looks easy to do, thanks for the simple tip. I think the final Tactical Rhino for my Relictors will have an arrow. If it is totally easy - i may risk going back and doing the other five...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like it - very neat. I have heard that scotch tape can lift paint on occasion, so people might want to look out for that. Less tacky tapes (or things like post-it notes) would be an alternative.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks. I noticed a little bit of the Blood Red that was dry brushed onto the surface came up with the tape, but nothing bad or even really noticeable. I would imagine that a quick spray of matte varnish / dull coat to seal it would keep this from happening.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I recommend using painter's masking tape. It's cheap, available in most stores that sell paint, and it works great for what you're doing.

    http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Scotch-BlueBrand/Scotch-Blue/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Do you use any abrasive products on the area that you paint? Or will it work without roughing up the previously applied paint?

    ReplyDelete

Recommended Posts

Blog Widget by LinkWithin