After some back and forth with Mark, it appears that some of my designs are not really practical to cut in vinyl. He suggests a full-color print, and I will combine this with my APRO Lander order and get everything done together.
The good news is this will make finishing this rocket soooooooo much easier (even though the fins will present some challenge). The messy paint on the outside helical pieces won't matter since they'll be completely covered with the window pattern vinyl. Also, I might be able to add in a few fine details that I couldn't even consider if I were just cutting.
The bad news is that I'll have little chance of matching my green paint to the printed green parts, and can't predict whether I'll even be close. This leaves two parts of the design in flux: the green outlines of the helical pieces, and the green strakes.
Neither have any realistic chance of being vinyled. And so, in each case, I have three choices how to proceed:
1) Keep the design, paint them green, and don't worry if the color matches the other green parts.
2) Change them to white, which I can paint to match the white vinyl well enough
3) Change the design.
I'm not enamored of any of these choices, but need to try anyway.
The helical piece edges should not be white, of that I'm sure. I'm going to put a green outline on the window vinyl, so it'll be on the outer surface rather than the edges, which is not as good but hopefully OK.
The only other alternative I can think of is to eliminate the green altogether. Bleh.
The strakes are not awful as white, although it still seems Wrong:
I'm leaning towards this design (or something similar), which leaves the strakes black:
The strakes kind of disappear in this design, although it still looks OK.
Hopefully this'll all look decent when it's done. At least I won't have to worry about a horrible masking job, or poorly applied fluorescent paint...