I wasn’t at all looking forward to doing the last work needed to achieve the Sacred, What I Want. Or maybe just getting closer to that semi-mythical Grail.

I started (he says as if months of worrying about doing a sodding figure has a starting point) by painting the test figure. The first step was painting the figure Tamiya XF-1 Flat Black to establish the darkest areas. I still had some of the paint I’d used to paint the engines and fuselage side details which I like. I find that “chrome silver” is far too silvery and aluminum wasn’t giving me the look I wanted, so I painted the high points (defined as those areas where light hits it directly) using Tamiya X-32 Titanium Silver (1 part) mixed with X-18 Gloss Black (3 parts), and then misted a bit of Tamiya X-25 Clear Green over the legs:

Okay, that worked well enough to show me that I wasn’t barking up the wrong moon. I figured that masking the arms was essential (as an aside, is there ever any unessential masking?). Yeah, well, those arms aren’t all that large. In fact, they’re rather small (as are the fingers). By the time I had them masked (or what would turn out to be temporarily had them masked), it looked like the figure was an inpatient burn victim:

What I also discovered is that if one is using pieces of masking tape (Tamiya’s) that are very small, instead of acting like tape, something easily (all terms being relative) bent around edges and curves, it acted like cardboard. It didn’t want to bend. It didn’t want to stay folded. And mostly all the pieces of tape, being as small as they are, now don’t have enough adhesive surface to do what I wanted them to do. Fine. I left the sections of tape on that weren’t acting like divas (because don’t all inanimate objects “act”?) in place. The areas where the tape was being a diva were masked by diluting PVA (about 50%) with water, I put it on as a liquid mask. I did not ask myself, “what could go wrong”. I figured I’d wait and see.

A note here. I did not start painting this with the expectation that anything would go as I wanted. (Confidence. I got ’em!) I was prepared to strip the paint off this at least 75-80 times before I just sodding gave up and left it under whatever paint was on there…there. I did not expect anything to work. So yeah…if it all went sideways, I expected to strip the paint off:

I mean, in looking at the next photo, it’s evident where the overspray went. If the “liquid mask” didn’t work, well, there are worse ways of spending 45 minutes than getting to strip Starbuck (yeah…I know). But the silver and Tamiya X-25 Clear Green certainly worked:

Not the time to borrow trouble but to build upon my seeming success, since I hadn’t done anything (yet) that would require me to remove the paint already put down, I went on to paint the torso. The character’s uniform had the actor wearing two shirts; a lighter gray under a dark gray (or light black) so I got those under paint as well. And since stripping paint is stripping paint, I hit the boots, belts, holster, holster strap with Tamiya X-18 Semi Gloss Black. The chain and tags were done with yellow and orange colored pencils:

The “liquid mask” worked as I’d hoped it would. And though a bit tedious, the PVA came up (mostly):

I just couldn’t wait. After obsessing FOR MONTHS over this particular part of the build, it was done and fell within my 90%-95% window was achieved. So of course I had to see how it presented:

Yeah…that’s what I was after. It was at this point that I realized that it’s DONE: