A steel barrel

Sun mask

I spent a decent time masking the cannon's barrel, to be sure. Protecting the tipmost part was a simple setup of two overlapping pieces of tape, but on the stem side that didn't fly. As the end of the paintable area was where the barrel went inside the housing setup that was going to remain green, I had to cover the mouth of the other one first. I just applied a bunch of tangential pieces that anded up looking like a strange sun. That was enough to protect the greenery from overblasts.

Painting!

The instructions kept telling that every metallic piece had to be painted as aluminium, but I wasn't going to even consider such nonsense, I loaded the airbrush with steel (VMA 71065 Steel) and blasted away. As was to be expected, the contrast between a bright metal and the dull, boring green was almost eye-searing.

With the tapes removed and on its own it maybe looked a tiny bit less awful, but still damn weird. My next step was going to be painting the rest of the metallics with a paintbrush, and I didn't expect the situation to become any prettier. More bling on a flat green bulky thing? Not a promising mental image.