Titan Stripes

One of the toughest problems in painting (beyond getting white or yellows looking magnificent) is the challenge of undertaking straight lines, or stripes, on curved surfaces. 

For my Reaver Titan, however, this is exactly what I wanted to undertake. Now, there are numerous approaches to achieving this. The best I've seen uses sticky tape designed for acrylic nail art (i.e. nail varnish / nail polish). However, all the techniques are broadly similar. Take something with straight edges that is tacky, but not too sticky that it will rip off the layer that you adhere it to. Put said sticky stuff over the model, and then paint as best you can. Remove the tack and you should have straight lines underneath. 

The image above shows a pitiful attempt at illustrating what I mean using regular masking tape which I had left over from decorating a room in the house (i.e. it goes over power sockets, or the edges where the walls meet the ceiling to avoid paint getting splodged on the ceiling). Its application here is precisely the same. However, the hard part is the raised surface of the Reaver's shoulder pad. This means that some of the paint will creep in underneath parts of the otherwise straight edge. Although there are solutions on the market to this, I have found its slightly more bother than the cost otherwise pays off. Hence slightly thicker masking tape usually does the job. 

Here, the titan shoulder pad has already been base coated in white. I'm going to add black stripes to the pad, and then fill in (and / or touch up) using a slightly brighter white. The results of this is displayed below. 

The lines are for the main part super-neat, although there are one or two slight issues that I will go back and paint over when the time comes -- or hide with the use of weathering paint / oil more likely. I am not claiming this is perfect, but it is very sufficient for curved surfaces for my purposes and the grime layer that will be added later will take care of most of the slight issues seen in the second image.