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Painting my GH3 Les Paul, Part 3
In part 1, I prepped the plastic and got it ready to be painted. Part 2 had me priming the plastic, drawing the flame design on paper, and laying down the backing color paint. Now we have gotten all the boring preparatory work and get to the meat of this project. In this installment I'll mask off and paint the first layer of the design.
Follow the jump to see the faceplate starting to shape up nicely.
Follow the jump to see the faceplate starting to shape up nicely.
This is the part of the project where I have to be most careful. As the design starts to take shape, I start getting excited to see it finished. I have to force myself to go slow so I don't ruin the work I've done and have to start over again. The last 2 installments cover less actual work, but I'm doing it that way to keep me from trying to work too fast.
The first thing I need to do is to mask off the faceplate so the parts I don't want to to be silver, won't be. I'm using Scotch 3M Painters Tape, the blue stuff. It has a low tack so I can remove it easily without it damaging the shiny black paint I put down in part 2. The package says it's safe to leave it on for up to 14 days. I only need it to stay for a couple of hours, so I'm good to go. The tape comes in multiple widths, and I'm going to be using the 1 1/2 inch width cause it's what I have on hand. For this application, wider would be a little better, but I use this for all my masking and it's a good middle of the road width.
Here is a picture of the tape applied and the design drawn on it.
You can see I've already drawn the design on it. I laid the tape down the length of the faceplate because that was the way my design was going to run. Laying it across the faceplate would have had me cutting each strip into multiple segments. While that is possible, it is more opportunity for mistakes to happen. I wanted as few edges to cut across as possible so that's why I went lengthwise. The little black edge was covered before I painted and since I wasn't going to cut it I left it off to make the drawing and cutting easier.
I started by drawing the flames on with a pencil so I could erase and make adjustments if I needed to. Once I had the flames like I like them, I went over the pencil lines with a fine black felt tip marker so they would be easy to see.
Since I'm going to be cutting the mask directly on the surface of the faceplate I need to be very careful with the knife and not press down to hard. To make this easier I put a brand new blade in my knife before I began the cutting step. With a new blade you don't need to press down too hard to get it to cut the tape. I hold the knife at about a 30-40 degree angle the faceplate and just drag the blade along the top of the tape using the weight of the knife handle to score the tape. The knife dictates the curves in this fashion with me just offering guidance so it doesn't go too far off the design. This is critical to me getting smooth curves. Nobody wants angular flames, unless that's the effect you are going for. I wasn't going for that effect.
To keep things simple, I cut one strip of tape at a time, removing the strip immediately after I cut it. Because I laid the tape down from right to left the tape overlaps on the left hand side (you can see it in the photo), so I worked the cuts from left to so the strips come off easily.
This is what it looks like after all the tape has been cut and the unmasked sections removed.
This is where the excitement really set in. As I said in part 2, I've never done flames by hand before and the masking came out looking really good to me. I added more tape around the edges so that silver overspray wouldn't accidentally land on a black part where I didn't want it.
When doing any masking with spray paints, and especially when using strips instead of a full sheet, you run a great risk of bleeding. Bleeding is where the color you are painting "bleeds" under the edges of the tape on the background color. THIS IS BAD! Very bad. It's nearly impossible to fix without starting over. The fact that I have strips of masking increases my chances of bleeding since every place where the tape overlaps is another chance for paint to seep under the tape. It's almost a fact of life that you are going to have bleeding. I don't know anyone who has had more than 1 or 2 perfect masks that got no bleeding, so the trick is to conceal the bleed areas. The easiest way to do this is to pro-actively conceal it before you lay down your second color. You can do this by either spraying a coat of the background color or a coat of clear before you spray your color. This way when it bleeds, it's either bleeding the same color as the background or it's bleeding clear. Now your bleeds can't be seen and you've sealed the gaps that caused the bleeding. Once the sealing coat is dry to the touch it's safe to paint with your color.
I prefer to use the background color when I can, so for this step that's what I did. I'll need to use clear in the next step, but I'll explain why when I get to it. After I let the black dry for about an hour I sprayed 2 coats of silver over it. I let the silver dry for about and hour then I carefully pulled the tape off, being sure not to touch the silver anywhere. I used Testor's Silver enamel model paint and it takes about an hour to get dry to the touch, but it isn't completely dry at that point so it is still fragile. I didn't want to leave the tape on too long because if the paint dries too much it will form a single hard layer and can pull the some of the paint up with the tape. You can prevent this by going around the edge of the masking with a sharp knife to make sure it's separates nicely.
Here we have the faceplate after I removed the tape. There are a few flaws in the paint from where I removed the tape, but I'll cover them with the next layer, so no worries. The silver part has a lightly raised edge visible in the photo. This is where the paint built up slightly around the tape edges, similar to the way snow drifts against a hill. It will settle a bit as it dries completely, and the second masking step will push it down a bit as well. If it's still too bad, I'll lightly smooth it down by gently sanding it before I clear coat it.
I need to let this layer dry completely before the next step. I'll be putting tape back on top of it and I don't want the tape to lift the silver paint. Since it's sitting on top of shiny black paint, it won't have as good of a grip on the layer beneath it like the black does with the primer. I'll let it cure for about 24 hours. I'll check it then and see what I think about trying to mask on it. If I'm not happy with it, I'll give it another 24 hours. This may sound like a lot of time, but I've let showcase models cure for a week or more before touching them sometimes. No matter how hard you try, you absolutely cannot let it dry too much.
In the fourth and final installment, I'll pull out the airbrush and lay down some detail paint, finish up the main design paint work and clear coat for protection.
The first thing I need to do is to mask off the faceplate so the parts I don't want to to be silver, won't be. I'm using Scotch 3M Painters Tape, the blue stuff. It has a low tack so I can remove it easily without it damaging the shiny black paint I put down in part 2. The package says it's safe to leave it on for up to 14 days. I only need it to stay for a couple of hours, so I'm good to go. The tape comes in multiple widths, and I'm going to be using the 1 1/2 inch width cause it's what I have on hand. For this application, wider would be a little better, but I use this for all my masking and it's a good middle of the road width.
Here is a picture of the tape applied and the design drawn on it.
You can see I've already drawn the design on it. I laid the tape down the length of the faceplate because that was the way my design was going to run. Laying it across the faceplate would have had me cutting each strip into multiple segments. While that is possible, it is more opportunity for mistakes to happen. I wanted as few edges to cut across as possible so that's why I went lengthwise. The little black edge was covered before I painted and since I wasn't going to cut it I left it off to make the drawing and cutting easier.I started by drawing the flames on with a pencil so I could erase and make adjustments if I needed to. Once I had the flames like I like them, I went over the pencil lines with a fine black felt tip marker so they would be easy to see.
Since I'm going to be cutting the mask directly on the surface of the faceplate I need to be very careful with the knife and not press down to hard. To make this easier I put a brand new blade in my knife before I began the cutting step. With a new blade you don't need to press down too hard to get it to cut the tape. I hold the knife at about a 30-40 degree angle the faceplate and just drag the blade along the top of the tape using the weight of the knife handle to score the tape. The knife dictates the curves in this fashion with me just offering guidance so it doesn't go too far off the design. This is critical to me getting smooth curves. Nobody wants angular flames, unless that's the effect you are going for. I wasn't going for that effect.
To keep things simple, I cut one strip of tape at a time, removing the strip immediately after I cut it. Because I laid the tape down from right to left the tape overlaps on the left hand side (you can see it in the photo), so I worked the cuts from left to so the strips come off easily.
This is what it looks like after all the tape has been cut and the unmasked sections removed.
This is where the excitement really set in. As I said in part 2, I've never done flames by hand before and the masking came out looking really good to me. I added more tape around the edges so that silver overspray wouldn't accidentally land on a black part where I didn't want it.When doing any masking with spray paints, and especially when using strips instead of a full sheet, you run a great risk of bleeding. Bleeding is where the color you are painting "bleeds" under the edges of the tape on the background color. THIS IS BAD! Very bad. It's nearly impossible to fix without starting over. The fact that I have strips of masking increases my chances of bleeding since every place where the tape overlaps is another chance for paint to seep under the tape. It's almost a fact of life that you are going to have bleeding. I don't know anyone who has had more than 1 or 2 perfect masks that got no bleeding, so the trick is to conceal the bleed areas. The easiest way to do this is to pro-actively conceal it before you lay down your second color. You can do this by either spraying a coat of the background color or a coat of clear before you spray your color. This way when it bleeds, it's either bleeding the same color as the background or it's bleeding clear. Now your bleeds can't be seen and you've sealed the gaps that caused the bleeding. Once the sealing coat is dry to the touch it's safe to paint with your color.
I prefer to use the background color when I can, so for this step that's what I did. I'll need to use clear in the next step, but I'll explain why when I get to it. After I let the black dry for about an hour I sprayed 2 coats of silver over it. I let the silver dry for about and hour then I carefully pulled the tape off, being sure not to touch the silver anywhere. I used Testor's Silver enamel model paint and it takes about an hour to get dry to the touch, but it isn't completely dry at that point so it is still fragile. I didn't want to leave the tape on too long because if the paint dries too much it will form a single hard layer and can pull the some of the paint up with the tape. You can prevent this by going around the edge of the masking with a sharp knife to make sure it's separates nicely.
Here we have the faceplate after I removed the tape. There are a few flaws in the paint from where I removed the tape, but I'll cover them with the next layer, so no worries. The silver part has a lightly raised edge visible in the photo. This is where the paint built up slightly around the tape edges, similar to the way snow drifts against a hill. It will settle a bit as it dries completely, and the second masking step will push it down a bit as well. If it's still too bad, I'll lightly smooth it down by gently sanding it before I clear coat it.I need to let this layer dry completely before the next step. I'll be putting tape back on top of it and I don't want the tape to lift the silver paint. Since it's sitting on top of shiny black paint, it won't have as good of a grip on the layer beneath it like the black does with the primer. I'll let it cure for about 24 hours. I'll check it then and see what I think about trying to mask on it. If I'm not happy with it, I'll give it another 24 hours. This may sound like a lot of time, but I've let showcase models cure for a week or more before touching them sometimes. No matter how hard you try, you absolutely cannot let it dry too much.
In the fourth and final installment, I'll pull out the airbrush and lay down some detail paint, finish up the main design paint work and clear coat for protection.
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