Masking off markings for spraying

Jakko

Way past the mad part
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Jakko
(I already posted the following in my thread about a Churchill AVRE, but I thought it might be a good idea to repeat it in the tutorials forum, as it’s a good bet it’s a little hidden in the other thread.)

The Churchill I’ve been building had the code A3 prominently on an ammo box fixed to the rear of the turret. Since the model is primed white and the A3 was too on the real tank, I decided to add it by masking.

I have a photo of the real tank that shows the marking quite well, but unfortunately it’s skewed — not unexpected in a photograph, of course. Luckily, Adobe Photoshop has a perspective crop tool that you can use to trim unwanted bits off an image and straighten it at the same time. You can get at it by holding the mouse button pressed on the crop tool, after which a menu pops out so that you can select the tool you want:

799749.jpg

Then what you do, is click on the four corners of the part you want to cut out and straighten. Naturally, I chose the corners of the ammo box:

799750.jpg

Pressing the Return key or clicking the check mark button in Photoshop’s toolbar crops the image to the bit you selected, and makes it rectangular:

799751.jpg

It’s not the right size, though, so that needs to be tackled next. Since I cropped the image to the size of the ammo box, it was simply a matter of measuring up the ammo box on my model and using its height and width for the image (via the menu Image → Image Size):

799752.jpg

I had to turn the “Constrain Proportions” checkbox off near the bottom of the window, else changing the image’s width also alters its height, and vice-versa, making it unlikely that the image can be gotten to the model box’s dimensions.

Unfortunately, the letters are white on a grey background, and that’s not all that clear. However, by making it negative (menu Image → Adjustments → Invert) and using the Levels tool (menu Image → Adjustments → Levels), I turned the A3 black and made the background much lighter, which improves legibility a lot:

799753.jpg

To make the dark parts of an image darker, you move the little black triangle under the graph to the right; to make the light parts lighter, you move the light grey triangle to the left. (The middle grey triangle adjusts the balance between light and dark; I kept that in the middle because moving it didn’t really make much difference with the fairly extreme amount of lightening I applied.)

Then it’s just a matter of printing it out at 100% size:

799754.jpg

Which results in:

799755.jpg

Then it was off to my hobby room to cut out the A3 with a new, well-pointed knife:

799756.jpg

This isn’t difficult, but a somewhat steady hand helps. If you mess up, just print out another copy and try again (and if you think it’s likely you’ll go wrong, you can print out a few copies of the image on the same piece of paper before you begin cutting at all — saves on paper, time, ink, etc.).

With the characters cut out, I applied a little bit of PVA glue to the backs of both with a cocktail stick and put them onto the model:

799757.jpg

When I get round to spraying the model, they’ll (hopefully) nicely keep those parts of the turret white, and I can pry them off easily because PVA glue doesn’t stick that well to a plastic model. I suspect some touching up may be required, but that’s a lot easier than trying to paint codes like this freehand.
 
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