I do understand the in field this was probably done by a guy who was a peasant a few months prior so may be rough. I am mostly trying to reduce overspray. I could free hand it but I don’t know if my skills are up to snuff!
I would go with hand painting it. I tried taping off the stripe on my Ukraine YPR- 765A1 a while ago and after about half of it, I abandoned it and went with hand painting the stripe. I couldn’t get the tape to conform around bumps and protrusions and ended up covering up more overspray than if I had just started with a hand painted stripe. The original stripes would most likely have been hand painted with a brush anyways, so it looks better and more realistic in the end.
I found a set of Microscale decals for white parallel stripes in my collection. With a gentle amount of mark softener, it should work. The packing say " Better than masking"
You can get a more realistic hand-painted look if you add small amounts of edge waviness after making the initial lines razor sharp and straight. Even a wavy line looks nearly perfect at scale so it’s better looking to start straight.
A roof-only cross is far and away the most common but there are a few photos with stripes on the turret sides:
@KurtLaughlin and @HeavyArty I think hand painting is the way to go! I wanted to spray it so I could use chipping fluid to stress it, but I can always handle that in weathering phase with some oils!
My understanding is with something like Vallejo the water in you use for thinning will activate the chipping fluid while painting. I could be wrong though! Testing on a sheet of styrene is a good idea
I don’t have any retarder and don’t have a need for it often since I usually use Vallejo.
Hmm, either I don’t worry about chipping, the photos @KurtLaughlin posted suggest there wasn’t much anyway, or I trying masking with putty and spray. I may go the Vallejo route as spraying will be a pain
