RC Bodies - first steps

I've now done a couple of lexan bodies for  remote controlled electric cars, for three chassis a colleague of mine uses.

Lexan bodies are different to work with than anything I previously hit with my airbrush. Firstly, they are painted from the inside which also means that one has to very carefully plan colours for each part of the body and take even more care to mask anything that isn't supposed to be hit with the current colour.

My first attempt was made on a big 1:10 chassis, which came supplied with window masks, which is a great convenience indeed. My buddy wanted the body white with yellow mirrors. All other paint would be stickers.

I used the supplied masks and Fascolor paint for this. This paint gave me a spot of trouble, since it didn't seem to be impressed with my airbrush cleaner at all, I had to flush the paint mechanically, with Q-tips and valliant use of the destilled water squeeze bottle. I realise that there will be a cleaner and thinner for this stuff, but I've stayed clear of it for now for this reason.

The result was good though, even after shoe goo was used to reinforce the bodies edges and stickers were applied, the body weighted in lighter than another one done with rattle cans.

Next was a cheap 1:12 body, with the request to hit it with "any colour", which I understood as green light for an extra manly paint scheme. This is quick and dirty over night with rally stripes masked with blue tape.

Following the purchase of a new chassis called X-Ray, my colleague wanted a red and white paintjob with some chevron style borders. I tried to mask these borders with tape and regretted this when I discovered some bleeding paint. :/ 

 

This was rather deftly fixed by my colleague with strategic use of the supplied decal stickers. =]

For the second X-Ray body I was supposed to follow the Team Force India scheme. This was the first time using liquid mask for me. This worked great, no question, but is also a skill to improve where small details matter. Unfortunately I messed up one of the colours in this body. The red was supposed to be orange, but I used a non-opaque neon yellow instead of an opaque yellow and ended up with basically just red parts. Since I'm unable to properly see red and green colours and failed to do a mix test and proper dry comparison... it's red. Ah well. The clear and neat separation of the green, white, red and black areas does look nice.

The previous results must have been sufficiently good to make some more bodies come my way. Six 1:12 bodies reached my desk. My first step here was to apply liquid mask to all of them. I bought finer markers, since the one I had were not fine enough to define a line for the exacto knife. The design is marked from the outside on the clear foil which protects the body from accidental overspray.

I got creative, admittedly with the use of Google Image Search for inspiration, and ended up with the following results.

 

My takeaway from this batch is that it is a good idea to separate colours with black lines. :)