Hi all . Hope everyone is doing fine. I am curious to know what are some of the prefered methods in doing camo that have softer edges? I tried using masking tape but it results in hard lines after being removed. Or maybe there are special masking tapes for modellers that I don't know about. I would really appreciate some advice here. THanks.

soft edges are the domain of the airbrush for the most part. Some subjects have softer edges then others, and some even with soft edges in scale they would be hard masked completely as at 35 or 72 times smaller you couldn't see the edge(most modern armor is like this); and some others are more in-scale by using a brush-as the original may of been done with a mop or broom.... Other camo jobs like WWII ships were painted with rollers and are always hard edged.

Now as far as 'looking good', a mop-job in real life is usually airbrushed with a soft edge on the model, or a very crooked-sloppy- paint rollered ship scheme is hard masked, as most viewers wouldn't appreciate the 'true' scale paintjob and see it as poor modeling skills. Even the most heavy handed painted plastic model is rarely as lousy looking as the paint quality on the real subject, they were as sloppy as can be.

If you do not have an airbrush, the best thing is to use card-stock paper and cut templates, then attatching them with blobs of blue-tac or rolled up tape to get it to 'stand off' a few mm from the surface. You then simply spray paint at a 90 degree angle to the mask and the minor overspray will soften the edges. Should be a couple articles in the features section. This of course is very time-consuming and takes a lot of planning, but can be made to look quite acceptable. The templates need to cut properly and fitted to the model consistantly. With airplanes its quite simple but gets very difficult with armor. If I were using spray paints I would probably hard-mask armor camo. You can get nice curved lines by using a professional masking tapes that come in flexible pin-stripe widths and fill in the rest with regular tape.

Another technique that will not make it 100% accurate but save time if you don't want to freehand and DO have an airbrush is to cut multiple pieces of card paper in to all kinds of 'camo' like curve shapes and hold the card stock edge just off the model to spray the edge. there is much less overspray with an airbrush so the model need not be masked up. Templates are used all the time with airbrush artwork and effects like 'real flames' done on cars. If something is not right like one spot has too hard an edge you can quickly just hold the one small section and hit it again, and the various curves can be maniuplated and turned instantly into just about any shape. If its in a corner, find the right shape, fold the template a bit, hold it near and spray... This is a very good technique for single-action airbrushes. If you watch an airbrush artist do flames on a hot-rod, you wouldn't believe how good they do with twisting and turning templates with practice. The frisket-type mask is always used in illustration work, not much is done free-hand only.

Whatever you chooose, just rustle up some old kits, spare parts(a lot of kits have extra turrets and wheels these days), plastic toys, or even milk jugs(the plastic grocery ones, not your girlfriend's) and go camo-crazy practicing.

I use silly putty for masking soft edge camo,its great stuff and cheap too.you can find it in toystores like toysareus

greetings jeroen,.

Its also reusable.

Tom

Wow forgot all about that stuff. I used to use it with my badger 350 single action doing aircraft models years ago. That's another good one

Thanks guys for the info. I'll need some practice first as I don't own an airbrush.