Not learning from your repeated mistakes is stupid

First: why?

Based on my previous post I got a comment (in the Finnish version), why do I waste so much time and effort in masking and painting instead of just applying the transfers.

The simple answer is: because I want to.

My somewhat longer answer is: my earlier experiences with decals have been random to say the least and most unsatisfactory. If a gigantic major piece doesn't end up being in a ball of thousand wrinkles, overfolded or just plain skewed when cured, some others end up being rotated, wrong, badly, broken or otherwise annoyingly wrong.

Because I haven't, to this date, bothered using a drop of laquer on my models (and I guess someone takes offense at this one as well), the awful silver lines have been shining all around the planet from every single angle you can look a model at. On the grooves they've been tenting or bubbling over the bulges. Or bubblied on their own, because why not?

Of course all of this can be avoided with some Skills and Tools. When I did bother with decals my skills were even worse than today, if you can imagine such a thing, and my tools. Well, they've been worse fewer and much simpler. These are the reasons why I decided to leave the decal circus for other modelers and the thought of trying again hasn't simply occurred to me. Perhaps I haven't felt like endangering my models at the last stage of building anymore.

No matter what, the essential and the most important thing is: I happen to enjoy painting those things myself. Oh I do admit that the results are what they are and I almost always have to fix them up. But in the end, I'm doing this for my own amusement and to relax (hohohoho).

Let there be insingia

The 45-degrees rotated swastikas made it to the tail, the Balkenkreuz edges on the sides and tops of the wings. For a really good reason I'm not going to show the bottom at all, because being as stupid as I am I had not remembered the lesson I supposedly learned the last time.  And that is: don't use that tape for anything delicate or important. My proof shall be presented in photo #3.

As the last photo also shows, I fixed up the cockpit tub surroundings and glued on the propeller unit. I also fixed some small patches on the belly side, but as I said, I'm not showing it now.

Vacatioooooooon

I just realized that this weekend's Model Expo 2014 is going to be missed, thanks to traveling. I didn't get to build up a run of eight consecutive visits. Bugger.

Therefore I'll return to this topic in a couple of weeks again. Or not. That depends on my nerves and level of motivation.