Curdled Milk

I thought I would share how I paint my figures. Instead of fully assembling them I have found it easier to paint the pieces in parts and then assemble them. However I wanted to avoid gluing over paint - especially with plastics so I started using Vallejo Liquid Mask - 535. It works very well but if you can’t find it or you want to use something else, you can find several brands of liquid masking agent at an art supply store.

Basically the idea is to paint a blob of the liquid mask over every glue spot. This would be both sides of the shoulder, the arm joints on the torso, the neck cavity where the head will go, and the backpack/back pack nob on the torso.

When the blobs dry you can prime them as normal. The mask dries fairly quickly so I would suggest working with smaller amounts at a time rather than pour too much out otherwise you will find that you waste quite a bit of it. For the arms I painted one side - waited until it was dry and then painted the other side with the mask.

My goal with the mask is to allow me to get to the torso details and paint the arms in the basics and then once assembled go back and touch up as needed.

Just to make things easy I drilled holes into the bottom of the heads, applied the mask only to the very bottoms, and mounted them on paperclips. I have found that putting the paperclip into a pin vise makes for a very handy grip.

Again the heads are painted in their basics and once attached to the figure they will be finalized. Painting them separate though helps you get full access to the lower face and under the chin better. It isn’t fully necessary but I find that it is helpful to have full control.

As with the other parts, the backpacks get painted separate. This is really convenient for getting to the exhaust ports on the backpack as well as the coils on the inner top (which is usually pretty obscured by the head).

More attention is paid to getting the inner areas of the backpack finalized as these are the areas that are hard to get to - while allowing for some leeway on the back - which can be touched up after assembly.

When you have painted enough of the figure to where you can start assembly all you need to do is take an x-acto knife or some other sharper implement (I used the GW sculpting too here) and gently scrape the area where the mask was applied. The mask should pull up fairly easy - just go slow and it won’t rip the paint up too much around it. The mask will have a rubbery stickyness to it and should ball up fairly well as you work it off the model.

Do this to all the joints and now you have the original surface to add better durability to the glue. In this case the plastic cement will have contact with the plastic surface! This will get you a rock solid joint that won’t come apart. I would definitely recommend only gluing on unprimed surfaces for both metal and plastic. For added strength you can always take an x-acto knife and score a grid pattern over both sides of the joint before gluing.

My Final thoughts on this are as follows:

I think this is a great method if you want to make it as easy as possible to get the details that are normally obscured by arms, backpack, heads, etc. It is a bit more time consuming that fully assembling the figure ahead of time but the end results will generally be better. This method is especially useful for character models and other figures that you want to add extra detail to.