Look what happened to my aluminium Humbrol emanel O_o For a second I was afraid to open it... but it turned out it didn't have evil intentions and was wiling to cooperate with me... Phew.
So, yeah, I painted the emblems aluminium again, then put on like three thick layers of Future... I'll try my luck one more time and if this time it won't work, I'll just hand paint the damn things, like GundamGuy suggested long time ago :P
In other "interesting" news: I've removed the BluTack from the binders and the effect is quite nice, IMHO:
I put on a light layer of thinned down black to darken the metallic black I originally used - so that the blue "docks" for the funnels stood out more.
You can see here that the BluTack masking wasn't exactly perfect, but considering the shape it had to cover it did a pretty well job - try masking something like that with a tape ;) And with the funnels in place the "imperfections" are unnoticeable.
Soon I'll be able to show how well this composes with my main colour... soon... ;_;
I also started and finished panel lining the whole model - there wasn't that much panel lines (this being a HG and all). The outer parts of the binders were the biggest test... but I had the most fun with the... innner parts of the binders (yep, the things you see above). I'll save the pics of how that turned out for the final photo session, but here are some other extra stuff I panel lined (just because I like panel lining and I had some extra paint left :P)
I really like how this turned out - too bad it won't be visible much - that's the leg joint :/
I added some bling to the binder supports too, just to make them a little less bland.
Last but not least - I added red panel lines to the binder's thrusters. Some turned out nicely (like the one in the pic), on some the aluminium painted started to peel off when I was cleaning up... >_>
And that's about it... Actually, the current status of the model is way more advanced - it's basically finished, only decaling is left (I'm ~30% done with it, after 2-3 hours). But since I want to keep the main colour a secret till the very end, you'll have to wait patiently till it's 100% finished - which shouldn't be too long now, unless I fck up something really bad :3
PS: Eh, I was going to post this update earlier, when I was still at my folks' house, but... I forgot to take the photos I took beforehand with me >_>.
Nice panel line work! Ah... the last step..decals. Take a whole lot of patience to get all of them on. Have fun!