A cautionary tale

Striped bumpers

Let's be very clear about this: I've always liked using the caution stripes in numerous places (ever since I was involved in making Doom pwads), in my opinion they've been most at home in scifi weapons platforms, such as Battle- and OmniMechs. They weren't that prevalent in real world warmachines, which wasn't really surprising, these being large and high-contrast-y decorations practically screaming "BEWARE OF THIS THING HERE!". And all this is why I was a bit surprised to find these stripes in the decal sheet, but I filed that under "test stuff" and as something that wouldn't have been done that way in fighting conditions. In any case I wanted to paint them instead of getting frustrated and sweary with the spaghettifying decals.

First I masked the immediate neighbourhood of the bumpers and started painting. The bottom layer was a dark grey (VMA 71268 German Grey), over which I then applied an almost full coverage of plain flat black (VMA 71057). Somehow I expected that this'd give the dark shapes a bit more realistic look than pure black.

Intermediate result

After giving the paint the traditional 24 hours of drying time before smashing masking tape on the fresh surfaces I started fooling with the tape. I settled with about 2,5mm strips and made some slashes and some backslashes per bumper. As my yellow I used a Medium Yellow (VMA 71002). The uneven painting was the result of a partially too thick paint that I hadn't been able to stir up enough. In this case the result looked kind of realistic to me, at least much better than a decal!