Both RC vehicles are still out of commission, waiting for parts. So I decided to paint the new body RC8 body I had ordered a month ago. I didn’t really need it, since the green cover it came with was perfectly functional… but since I was getting back into the hobby after 15 years, and since it was a used RC, I wanted to do something to make it feel a bit more like mine. And I really wanted to try painting again, since I had only done it once before long long ago for my Traxxas Sledgehammer.
After a lot of Googling I had a basic idea of how I wanted to paint it. Complicated designs are nice, but I needed something I could mask off with relatively straight bits of masking tape. The fewer corners I needed to learn to trim with a hobby knife, the better. After a few rough drawings I had a basic idea:
Here’s the first pass: using green painters masking tape and some newspaper to lay down the center and side stripes (which will be white), then the secondary center stripes and side pods (which will be silver), then covering up everything else (which will be purple) to only expose the 3 vent mouldings in the body:
Here’s the vents painted black, then the first layer of paper and tape removed to show the areas to be spray-painted translucent purple:
Here’s after the purple was put on:
Then I took off the masking for the side pods and secondary center stripes and put on the silver:
Finally I removed the center and side stripes and added the white (then took out the masks on the windows too):
Then added a couple decals:
And the final result on the car!
I screwed up the purple a bit (put it on too thick) and didn’t mask the black off properly, but I’m really happy with the results! I’m going to put the buggy tires back on the RC8 when I run this new cover, since the larger truck tires tend to rub the body and rip it (the green body already has several cracks in it). Maybe I’ll do a nice shiny new cover for the Stampede next!