I was wanting to use tamiya tape but couldn't find it locally. We are heading out on vacation tonight and I was trying to get it done before leaving, it didn't happen. I guess the rule of don't rush a paint job is a good one. I've ordered some tamiya tape. I'm using a badger airbrush, I don't remember what model it is. It retailed around $40 and does a nice job. I've gotten good at painting one color without covering the details. That took practice to learn how to do a light even covering. In you're experiences does tamiya tape else a better line or is leaking a common problem? I like the idea of spraying a second coat of the base color before painting the taped off areas.
Here's the problem I ran into. I haven't been painting for very long. One thing I learned is the dark color wasn't a good idea for a base. It took too many coats of orange to cover up the blue. I think going back to the yellow base is the way to go. The decal idea has me thinking. I think it would be hard to conforms decal around all the curves and odd shapes. Here's a few pictures of what I've to so far. I'm thinking I should strip it down and do it again.
Bleed free stripes are easy if you set your airbrush air high, paint volume so low it is almost dry when the paint goes on, holding the airbrush further away then normal. It does cause an almost powdery paint coat, but you can immediately remove the masking tape and clear coat to seal it with perfect results.
Normally you do light to dark anyway, normally: I did some Chessie too, I did the orange stripe first, than masked it off and did yellow and last blue-black.I don't paint the whole loco when I do multicolored ones, only the section that really needs the paint. If you can wrap tape around you can do decals anytime. But absolutely no need for this paint scheme. Get Tamiya tape, anything else is crap from my experience.
I've got tamiya tape ordered and it should arrive in a few days. I'll try painting the orange stripe first and then painting the yellow and blue. That would prevent the multi layers. Thank you for the help!
After doing a trial paint using tamiya tape everything else is junk. No runs or over spray. It seals great! The orange on the top is from my hands taking the tape off. No runs or bleeding.
The yellow is down and it turned out good. I'll let it set up and paint the blue later. I need to touch up the orange on the side.
View attachment 65739 View attachment 65740 View attachment 65741 Making progress. A few tiny areas to touch up and then decals.
Yeah, I first tried to use decals, but even with a brand new hobby knife, I found rather difficult to cut stripes with constant width all the way long. Furthermore I find very difficult to set them perfectly in place when having to deal with many angles (cab, protruding fairing forward on EMD's long hood's left hand side, etc). For me using tape and my not yet too shaky right hand is still the best way (or the least worse) to follow. About Tamyia tape, it's rather OK for me, however as mine is not transparent I find difficult to set it perfectly into place. My question: is there any transparent tape from Tamyia? Dom
View attachment 65785 View attachment 65786 View attachment 65787 All finished up. I would've liked to have used different b&o and 3802 decals but it works.
