Removing the liquid masks

Time to see the result of my test with the 3 different kinds of liquid masking. 

The completely painted Jaguar.

When I examined the fully painted model, some spots required an extra layer of green paint. Especially around the putty (see picture below), about half a millimeter around the edges of it, the paint seems to really  behave weird. Almost looks like the putty is exerting some kind of "pull" on the paint.

I just sprayed on an extra layer of paint. Because the airbrush was acting up again, I put on a rather wet coat, which would turn out a bad idea a little while later.

Removing Vallejo liquid mask

I started by removing the liquid Vallejo mask (on the tail). As you can see, it's not easy to remove. It's still smelly, still sticky and breaks up in small parts.

Removing silly putty on the wings

 Moving on to the silly putty on the wings, this is a breeze to remove and the separation line is very crisp. As you can see, the putty has perfectly adapted to all details of the wing.

The edge of the paint is not as nice as I would have liked,
especially on the underside.

On the bottom of the plane, I masked with latex. This is also easy to remove, because it doesn't tear or brake into pieces, but the edges are more ... flaky. I do believe this is not solely because of the latex but because I sprayed the paint to thick in one go.


Below is the end result, top and bottom. The top is nicer then the bottom, which is to my advantage. I'll simply ask people not to pick it up :-).

Latex

• Easy to apply
• Easy to remove

Vallejo liquid mask

• Difficult to apply
• Extremely hard to remove, especially in corners

Maybe I got a bad bottle? Does this stuff have an expiration date?

Silly putty

• Easy to apply, but it does take a looong time
• Very easy to remove

Further conclusions :

• None of the substances lifted the paint underneath
• Edges are not so nice, probably because I sprayed too much paint

In the future, I will continue testing with both silly putty and latex. The disadvantage of the putty is that it is now mixed with paint flakes and I'm not sure if I can use it again. Since it's very hard to get (unless you're willing to spend insane shipping costs), I might focus on latex again for the next test. I'll just need to get finer control at using the airbrush.

If this were an expensive model or something I'd want to be really detailed, I'd probably start over, but it was a test-model after all and I can't really expect my first camouflage to be perfect.