R32 Body Shell - Part 2

On to the painting. The body shell was initially primed with some Tamiya white as a base for the yellow. Revell provides decals for the yellow parts of this car. I chose not to use them however as I find trying to apply large flat decals over complex three-dimensional shapes rarely works well. Given the work I had to do to create the body shell I knew these decals wouldn't fit.

Instead of the decals I sprayed the yellow using zero paints Renault yellow. This is a pre-thinned matt paint that required several coats to built up into the final finish.

Between each coat I used safe cut paste by turtle wax to remove any blemishes. I used it again on the final cost to create a gloss finish to the matt paint. This would enable me to later apply the decals without needing an additional gloss coat.

The kit decals did come in useful though when it came to masking the yellow area off. I photocopied the decal sheet and used the yellow decals a a template to cut out of masking tape.

These were the applied to the body shell and blended together with some additional tape.


Fitting these masks reinforced my belief that the the yellow should be painted as they didn't fit at all well.With the mask in place the light blue could be sprayed. I had initially intended to use Tamiya sky blue but this proved to be far too dark so instead I used zero paints light blue. I did though lighten this with some white as I felt it still looked too dark in this scale. Again this was applied in light coats and polished in between.


The dark blue on the top of the engine cover was also masked and sprayed. I used tamiya dark blue for this as it matched the dark blue in the kit decals that were provided for this purpose.

With all the masking removed the few areas of over-spray were cleaned up and the body shell was ready for decaling.