Masking is tedious but I find it kind of relaxing. This is the last masking session for this bird.
First I took a look at my handiwork from last time and realized I had forgotten something:
Gonna be hard to stick a painting dowel in there.... I removed the tape covering the MM, shoved a rod up its butt, and retaped. Ahh, better.
Next, the middle fins needed the fine masking around their root. I think I did a better-than-usual job here, although I shouldn't jinx it.
Finally, the mask for the pods. Here's what the masks looked like as delivered by Mark:
The mask is very close to being plain old yellow vinyl, although this time I think I detected a slightly less grippy adhesive (could be imagining it, dunno). Anyway, each pod needs one of those hourglass thingies wrapped around it to keep out the red and leave the nice white swoosh at the end. Applying these pieces proved quite a bit harder than I expected, if I used standard vinyl application techniques. Even though I made the masks a bit oversized so I didn't have to get the position *exactly* right, it was still a challenge to get them aligned satisfactorily. Eventually, on two of them, I found them to be sufficiently out of position that I just peeled them off and repositioned them. It turned out that in this case, that was by far the easiest way to do it (peel them completely off the backing and then place them where desired). I wouldn't normally do that with vinyl due to the inevitable touching of the adhesive side, but since these all need to get peeled off eventually anyway I figured it didn't matter if I got a bit of skin oil onto the sticky bits (heck, maybe it would make them easier to remove later on).
Here's what one of them looks like, in position:
What's white will be red, what's yellow will be white. I'll need to remember to re-burnish all the edges before painting (I often forget this!)
And here is the whole assembly, all ready for the red paint:
Whew!