Many thanks for your high praise gentlemen!
Painting those fine lines is more a matter of technique and patience than a steady hand.
4 aspects are very important:
- a high quality sharp-pointed brush (I use Windsor & Newton series 7, size 000 for this work). This is the easy part: simply spend some money!
- brush-control: getting both the consistency of the paint and the amount of paint on the brush right for every single brush-load.
Consistency: I place my paint on a tear-of palette, and thin it for every brush-load on the palette. I test the consistency by quickly painting a line on the palette. It has to be thin enough to at least flow well enough from the brush. But it can be thinned much more for translucent effects.
Amount of paint: There should be enough paint on the brush so the paint flows smoothly from it, but not so much that it flows uncontrollably. The latter is what most people struggle with, but the solution is simple: take away any excess paint. If it is too much, I touch the brush to a paper towel to unload it; but if it is only a little, I unload it by painting lines on the palette. When the brush doesn't leave any thicker 'drops' at the end of the lines when I leave the point, it is perfect.
Each brush-load only gives me a couple of centimeters of line, so I spend more time (and paint!
) on the palette than on the model.
- correcting: my lines are also a bit uneven and wobbly, but then I correct them. I do this before the paint hardens (so after every couple of centimeters of painting a line). I use the same type of brush, but clean and slightly moistened with mineral spirits, to re-activate the borders of the lines where they are wobbly and 'push' and wipe the paint to the correct position. This is the reason I use oils or enamels for this work instead of acrylics.
When I don't get it to my liking, I wipe the line away (almost) completely at the offending location and re-do it.
- patience. It simply takes time. The lines for these plates took me about 7 to 8 hours. There is a reason why I have been painting this hull for 6 months now...
wefalck wrote:
How did you paint the lines separating the copper panels, with a pen or a brush?
With a brush. Ink from a pen would be impossible to correct like I can with paint. Also, I wouldn't be able to vary the consistency for more transparent effects (like I used a lot with the wood planking effect).
Something that should work very well however, and probably much faster and easier than paint, are color pencils. AK sells 'weathering pencils' nowadays that would work perfectly, but similar stuff can be found in the art supply store. Just draw them on, making sure to sharpen to point regularly. Different degrees of transparency should also be possible, as well as some degree of correcting.
But I'm a bit wary of how well they will stay on the model in the future, especially since this part will mostly be covered with resin water or acrylic gel.
JIM BAUMANN wrote:
did you use a tape/pencilled guideline for the horizontals? a longitudinal template?
No, just by eye. The 'water line' had been airbrushed before with the help of masking tape, so that gave me a straith line to start from. So I worked from the top down, painting only the horizontals first. They are only about 1,5 mm apart, so you can judge this fairly easily by eye and correct accordingly.
The verticals were painted last. I did use a ruler to space these properly for the top row only, and from these the rest were painted by eye.