Now you can see how I “cheat” when painting a model. I paint as much as possible with the parts on the runners. Yes, it’s cheating, but yes, it’s quick. And not, it’s probably not the right way to do things. But yes, the way most kits are designed, the nub marks are often very well hidden. I will, of course, take parts off the runner and paint them separately as necessary, especially for rather visible outer armour parts. Hopefully this blog will encourage me to slow down, take my time, and cheat less – encouragement in that direction is welcome!There’s a co-moulded runner on this kit, with white, dark red, black and grey on it. I’ve snipped the colour sections off with my side cutters so I can paint them without worry of overspray.The red is a very dark red. I like the colour, but I’m going to build it up, starting with the Alclad gloss black undercoat.The black parts get the same undercoat.I’m going to keep the white parts simple. I may do a small amount of light shading, but first the Alclad white undercoat. This was hard as I really couldn’t see where the paint was going white on white! No doubt I’ll use the Createx pear white on top, after panel lining.Now the Alclad undercoat dries fast, so I can quickly spray on the Alclad Gunmental. I like the look of this paint, but not the expense! It works well though and goes on to give a very nice black metallic finish.After giving the airbrush a good cleaning (moving from lacquer to acrylic paints necessitates that) I put down a covering of Createx pearl red. Although this paint went perfected onto the MG Sinanju plastic without undercoat, it didn’t go too well onto the 1/60 Strike Crimson, so I thought the black undercoat would help. It didn’t. Maybe I just need to build up light layers?Here’s a close-up of what I got. The paint isn’t sitting right on the undercoat, and it’s pulling away from the edges. Now this looks great on the foot as it’s leaving the darker areas to show detail. I think the rest of the pieces will need another coat.

But it’s meant to be dark red! So next layer of paint will be either black shading, or dark red shading, or something like that, and a top coat of undiluted Tamiya clear red. We’ll see how that goes next time!