Roundel Mask Techniques - What's the accepted best practice on how to paint using masks

[Juggernut]

Since I'm such a novice at using masks, I thought I'd ask the community about what the best practices are when trying to paint three and four color roundels (not to mention more colors). 

 

This is what I did:  I cut the RAF C1 masks that i needed and proceeded to spray the different colors; each time removing and replacing a portion of the mask to add another color.  I find that it's hit-and-miss and that some of the other colors (typically the darkest ones), seem to bleed between the mask cut lines even though the paint is mixed correctly and I didn't spray heavy coats.  For instance, the outer ring on the roundel is yellow and I painted this prior to painting the dark blue (which I had to use enamel paint as I couldn't get the MRP version - nobody has stock).  Anyway, I lifted the mask and around the outside edge of the yellow, there's some areas where the blue paint bled through the mask cut and there's little areas of dark blue at certain locations around the edges of the yellow ring.  I don't think this is a huge issue as I'll just cut some appropriately sized circles to cover up the entire roundel when I paint the color coats so the offending dark blue areas should go away.

 

Just curious if there's a better way to paint these?

[dennismcc]

I use different techniques for roundels.

Paint the airframe colours first is one way and then use the masks, this is the traditional way and it works fine.

Or paint the outer roundel colour on the airframe, apply the masks and then paint the camouflage. I use this one especially for the 4 colour fuselage roundels.

I like to make sure that the outer roundel colour does not have  "base" colour as you can get a sandwich effect with a the edges showing two colours.

The tricky part is positioning the masks themselves initially and taking off and re positioning the roundel mask segements.

Here's an example of one of my builds using the pre opaint technique

And here is an older build using the traditional method, just for fun it's a French build

Hope this helps, masks are a vast improvement on decals for me as I am useless with decals.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

[Juggernut]

So basically, I'm doing it correctly, including taping across the roundel to remove it from the sheet; I guess I just need a bit more practice.  I noticed on your French build, you show a little bleed between the red and white in one of your photos.  I guess it's the nature of the beast so I'll just have to make allowances as I progress.  Thanks for the information and "how-to".  I think the next time I need to "replace" a mask section, I'll use liquid mask around the periphery to seal the cut between the two areas so it won't bleed through.

[dennismcc]

Glad to help out

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

[mozart]

Dennis is right, there are different techniques which are more applicable in some circumstances than others.  I like to minimise the amount of removing and replacing parts of the mask as much as possible, thereby reducing the risk of bleed, of edges not meeting etc.  So when recently doing these:

 

 

I firstly applied an "empty" mask, ie just the outer edges (which also included the chequerboard areas) and sprayed a white background.  Then I put the roundel mask in place and weeded out the centre ie red but left the white mask and blue mask in place.  Once the red was sprayed I put a piece of masking tape over it, the masking tape merely had to cover the red spot but didn't need to be cut to size.  Then I took out the blue outer and sprayed that.  No need for fiddly taking masks out then getting them back perfectly.  Hope that all makes sense.  I've demonstrated that technique here

[Juggernut]

These are the results I'm getting on my 1/48 Hasegawa Typhoon.  As you can see, it suffers from some bleed-through.  The bottom roundel on the right wing had a really strange occurrence.  The yellow MRP paint lifted when I pulled up the mask...no biggie as I have another mask that I can lay over it and respray the yellow.  The bottom already has the Medium Sea Grey applied...