I find myself in TK Maxx a lot this time of year. This year I found this 40's era truck with Christmas tree in the bed.
I liked the model but like most things bought from the high street, the paint job is awful!
When deciding on a new colour scheme, I needed something that would go with most decorations. Green was the main choice but a green truck next to a green tree would be too much.
I decided to go for a two tone paint job with an ivory top breaking the mass of green up.
The base model needed smoothing down. Some sandpaper and wet n' dry solved that bit. The clear "lights" were also pulled out of the tree before primer.
Then came the ivory;
I then masked of the ivory (the next day) in preparation for the metallic green.
This stage was far from issue free. The cheep paint on the standard model, although sanded back left a lot of hand grenades.
Mainly that the orange J tape, tape specifically designed for work like this (albeit on full scale cars) pulled off strips of the ivory when removed...
I had to mask the green off, sand back the area's with missing paint and start again. Then a small amount of green was removed... In the end I got there, it's not as smooth as I would have liked it, but the model itself isn't perfect.
The final layer (before lacquer) was a little bit of holographic Spectracoat. You can see below the effect this has in the light, it is Christmas after all!
Fine detail and pinstriping to come, as well as making sure each of the removed clear plastic lights, light up.
December 1st, 2019
The good news is this truck is ready for Christmas. The rest of the project was fairly simple, although holding a model of this size with one hand and carefully painting it with the other does pose some difficulties. Thankfully it wasn't dropped.
I also changed up the lights inside, the old setup simply lighted the whole truck up from a hole in the bottom. If the clear plastics in the Christmas tree lit up at all, it was purely accidental.
To ensure the clear plastics lit up a little brighter, I attached a bulb to each of them.
I'm also working on some scarab baubles for the main tree, I may add them to this blog once they're finished.