The subtitle of this post could as well be “Why I hate painting soft edge camouflage!”… and it would pretty much summarize how I felt during the process.

With the model painted in the base coat, the time came to get the camo done. This time I tried to use the J’s work masking set for Ferdinand, which i have got looong time ago and thought it might make the camo painting easier. The particular vehicle i wanted to replicate had quite unique pattern and I didn’t think it would be fun to paint it freehand, so this was quite obvious choice to try.

To summarize, the set is OK. It is not 100% accurate, more like inspired by the original pattern, there were places where I had to modify it a bit using Tamiya masking tape, to get it match the photographs, especially the left hull side. Not a big deal, but also not so smooth sailing as I was expecting. The masking pieces were easy to remove from the sheet and had similar qualities as masking tape when it comes to adhesion. Some pieces of the mask were quite large and complex, so I had cut them into smaller parts to make the application on the model easier.

Once all masked and painted I have looked at the model and concluded that the camo pattern is too hard-edge. Original vehicle was clearly painted freehand with a paint gun, so the camo had noticeably soft edges. To make it look closer to the original, I decided to soften the edges in freehand. This sucked. Royally! I had hard time to get the paint flowing smoothly and at the end had to compromise at a look that was not 100% to my liking, but I was so frustrated, I had enough. I hope that with all the “post-processing” aka weathering, the look would not be so bad.

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