Viper - Part 7 (Decals)

After 2 layers of Alclad II varnish, it was time for decals. On the Mark VII that was done quickly, on the Mark II it was a whole other story.
Don't get me wrong. The Revell decals are sturdy AND flexible. Where needed, they respond extremely well to setting solutions (I use Microscale  Micro Set & Sol). There's just so many of them ...

The tail stripe is broken up in many pieces. Rather cleverly, each piece has no more than 1 irregular shape to conform to, making it a lot easier to get them in place. Below a picture of an almost finished stripe, just missing a small horizontal strip (and one on top of the tailfin).

After applying your preferred setting solution, wrinkling (shown below) may occur. Do not worry: it will go away again, UNLESS you can't resist touching it, or the decal wasn't entirely placed straight in the first place. It pays to go slow and not rush through the many decals.

I mentioned the clever tail stripe design? I can tell future makers of this kit to pay extra attention to the horizontal part. Make sure both the lower and upper parts of the stripe have a little extra to help cover this gap, otherwise you end up with the result below!

How to touch-up these parts? The 2 Vallejo bottles of red I have don't match the color of the decals, so I was dreading having to mix and match paint to cover this mistake, but then I remembered I still have a LOAD of Humbrol/Revell paint, bound to contain the right shade of red.

Bingo! Humbrol #19 (Gloss bright red) is a near exact match. The bottle is over 20 years old and a gooey mess, because the oil has separated from the pigments. But some stirring and some added white spirit yielded more than enough to work with. The result is more than satisfying.

Before and after.

The 2 sisters, side by side, ready for another coat of varnish, then on to some decent weathering.

One small setback. While doing the decals on the Mark VII, I noticed a huge and ugly seam line over the tailfin. No idea how I missed it so far. I should really go over the entire model with more attention befóre I start painting. Oh well, these models have gone back to the spraybooth so many times already, one more session won't hurt.