Working from home during the Covid lockdown is proving challenging on the hobby time. Usually I find myself working late into the night to cover the hours I’m not working when I’m looking after my lad. Fortunately this last week I’ve been off work – stay at home holidaying. So I’ve made some progress on my Solaria Warlord titan.

Something I’ve been plucking up the courage to do for a while is to do some masked stripes on the armour plates. I toyed with the idea on my Reaver and Warhounds, but never did. However I think the Warlord and Warbringer will look cool with them. I decided to try some simple looking stripes on the leg armour of the Warlord. So using somed tamiya tape I masked up the outside half of the shin armour.

The white tape is 3mm wide Tamiya tape, the yellow is 6mm wide Tamiya tape. The yellow tape is typical masking tape – you know the papery kind. The white tape is some sort of plastic and is more elastic than the paper type. This allows it to conform to curved surfaces easily.

I applied the white tape first, having cut a few short sections of tape off the roll. I picked two rivets to line up on each side of the panel’s trim that gave me the angle I wanted. I used these as a guide to place the first piece of tape. Working from the centre of the piece of tape to each end, make sure the tape is stuck down and conformed to the panel’s details. To do this I used a scrap piece of plasticard, that was just lying on my desk, to push the tape into corners etc.

Once the first piece of tape was stuck down I placed the second piece right next to it, so there was no gap. I then placed the third piece of tape next to the second tape. Doing this ensures the tape is evenly spaced. I then used the second tape as the fourth, sixth, etc, until all the stripes are in place.

I blanked off the other half of the armour plate, I realised I was using alot of 3mm tape here and switched to the yellow 6mm tape 😂

Paint is going to bleed under the edges of the tape slightly, I tried to minimise the damage by airbrushing some of the base red colour I used for the plates – perhaps a better idea would be some clear varnish. In fact it’s probably a good idea to varnish before masking, just incase the paint underneath is delicate and lifts with the masking tape at the end – that would be a disaster!

Now after the red bleed minimisation coat I used a dark grey, followed by a light grey to try and get some shading on the curved plate. I was too heavy handed with the airbrush*, as you can see in the above image. Next time, I will just use dark grey and the final white paint (forgot to take a picture of the white before removing the masking tape – too excited to see what it looked like).

So that’s what I revealed after taking off the tape. There are a couple of places where white had got on to the red, I touched these up with some base red paint. I then moved on to painting the trim and panel lines.

But what do they look like on the Warlord titan? Well here are some pictures I took of the armour in place.

She has since been dismantled again (panels only blutacked on) to get some decals added. I think the stripes look awesome!

*I find airbrushing is something that I need to keep practicing. If I don’t do any for a while I need to retrain myself a bit 😂