This car has a quite complex 5 tone livery. It's yellow, green, and black with slightly darker shades of yellow and green triangular shapes. Out of the box, Tamiya provides a very intimidating decal sheet which assumes you will only be painting the car yellow. The other 4 colors are all decals which can be quite daunting, plus they tend to be slightly transparent.
My solution to this was to paint the car yellow and mask off for the green and black portions. I bought an after market decal sheet made by Shunko that includes all sponsor logos plus the darker yellow/green 'triangle' decals.
Here's the car masked off for the green after painting it with Tamiya TS-16 yellow. I used Tamiya TS-35 park green straight from the can which proved to be an excellent match.
Immediately before masking tape removal. This is the most nerve wracking part.
Success! Nice clean lines.
Masked off for the black on the bottom halves of the monocoque. Here is the final result. I used Tamiya X18 acrylic shot through my airbrush.
After some careful studying of the masking lines I noticed I needed to clean them up a little bit. The green areas needed to be slightly larger which meant extending them by maybe 1 mm or so.
Here's the end result after it was carefully masked and resprayed a few times. I did not expect this part to be so tedious!
I also had to respray the black but I didn't take pics of that. I also had to touch up some of the green/yellow around the headrest and various other parts. I'm probably boring my viewers with too much detail.
Now for the fun part. This is after applying all the decals from the Shunko set. They came out beautifully and really add a lot of life to the car. The only caveat is for some reason Shunko didn't include a darker green decal for the top of the airbox (where the Lotus logo is), which also extends to the top of the engine cover. I spent a few minutes mixing up some Tamiya acrylics that matched with the darker green decals, masked off the areas, and sprayed them with this mixture. I think it's a pretty good match! I will probably apply clear coat this weekend as it will be warmer and less humid.
My next update will focus on the wing elements and other parts that will be covered in carbon fiber decal.
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