This is the first installment of future tutorials which will appear as a 'sticky thread' at the top of 'Kits Corner'. I hope this will encourage current modelers to try new proven techniques...and also get some nonmodelers at UCP interested in the hobby.

Painting on the window trim straight and tidy is one of the most frustrating procedures in model building but it can be done with excellent results using this masking technique. This particular tutorial is based on airbrushing the black on but it will also work with spraying the black on with a can or brushing it on. The important thing is to make sure the edges of the tape are down good so paint doesn't leak under.

If you plan to spray the black on from can...I recommend spraying on a light coat of clear over the tape edges first to seal it, let it dry then spray the black on. This isn't necessary with the airbrush because it expells paint at a much lower volume. Regardless of which you use.... spray light coats.

Window trim is painted on after you final color/clear coats and your paint is polished etc.

Using Tamiya's 40mm wide masking tape to mask the window trim of this Revell Civic. As you can see this width tape works nicely for this job, one strip covers the whole area.


After pressing the tape into the grooves around the windows and firmly up against the lower raised window trim, I trimmed around the area with an Exacto knife.


I did the same for all windows and used the scrap trimmings to mask the rest of the car in conjunction with more unused tape.


In this step I have airbrushed black acrylic paint onto the exposed window trim areas. As a rule I use acrylic paints for window trim if the body has been painted with an oil based paint, and oil based enamel if it had been painted with an acrylic paint. This makes cleaning up edges easier because the paints are less likely to melt into each other. If you used a spray can for the black you should run an Exacto blade down each tape edge to score the black paint so it will make a clean 'break' when you pull the tape off.


After I removed the tape some of the edges appeared a little uneven. Using a toothpick, I scraped around the jagged edges of the black paint to even it out, this doesn't hurt the orange paint on the body. Some very minor touch up with a brush fixed the trim to look satisfactory.


Here is the completed trim work, I chose to leave the trim around the sun roof orange as I didn't want a big black square on the roof. This procedure was accomplished in about 40 minutes and the nice neat trim work makes a huge difference in how your model looks.