An Aquabird update - I tried Laddies 'freehand' style of painting and failed miserably - firstly I had bought automotive acrylic paint to spray on for the background white and naturally went back to paint shop to buy the same in the colors I wanted - wrong! - I found out the hard way car paint is not easily brushable if at all, it dried to quickly! - back to the drawing board.

The pics show my first attempt at hand brushing and in another it's gone - sanded off - the color was too dark and the brushing as above wasn't working - so what to do? - only one way to go now - mask it up and spray paint it.

the pics show the color now you see it now you dont - the fine line tape layout masking for the feathers - and in the areas above for the next row of colors those areas are brushed on with a paint strippable coating - it's like a rubberised pva glue that when I pull the paper and tape masks up the areas that were coated with peel off - that's the theory.

I used 1/4" 3M Fineline Tape (cream color) in parts until I found it was getting harder to pull it around the sharper curves, so then went to 1/8" tape which was a bit better to handle. I started to run out of that so back to the paint shop for more but they only had a plastic version (blue color tape) and I'm glad they did - boy was it easy to use - and it stretched very easily around the tighter curves.

So that's it for now - today is painting of the first color - maybe tomorrow the next color and so on - my float fly event is on the coming w/e - hope I make it - if not - well I tried.

cheers - maxiemac

smile it don't hurt