Toyota Corolla WRC

Body here is still not painted. I was afraid to start painting the body 🙂

i added some nuts for the weight. not sure why i wanted it to be heavy

i mixed a lot of colors myself since i had limited amount of them 🙂

i really liked how smooth was the surface after applying the paint from the airbrush. I used mostly paints from Revell because they were readily available for me from the local shops. The smoothness of the surface after airbrushing was the first big surprise for me.

I used Tamiya TS-26 pure white paint which was not backed up by any base paint. This already gave me heaps of troubles since the paint is very transparent. I did about 10 layers in total and almost all of the can was used. I also tried to polish it next day for some reason 🙂 then i had to repaint it of course.

I saw couple of other car models from other modellers and saw that all of them have nice dark panel lines. Since I had no idea on how to achieve this I tried everything from pencil to marker and I dont really remember what was the best (all kinda sucked). I did apply the panel lines before the clearcoat here, which ofcourse meant that i need to work extra to remove the residue. I am not making this mistake again.

first decals were the easiest ones

at this point i realized that I would need some solvent to soften the decals and make them flexible for the curved surfaces. I ruined some of the decals because I was poking them with the solvent brush (but I was able to fix them back).

my first big challenge were the blue decals. I tore them like 50 times each. At the end i had to mix paint which resembled with the color of the movistar blue, and fix the missing decal pieces.

and then this happened. I was unable to get the decal to follow the roof pattern. after all i was frustrated and tore the decal because i tried too hard to soften it.

with the help of my wife I was able to mix my own castrol green and red colours which helped to touch up the damn roof (and not only)

i was proud of myself because only i know how many touch-ups were done here

only one step to go was to paint the door and window seals black

and this happened....

I wrapped the whole car in tape to protect it from overspray. The tape then took the clearcoat and the decals with it when i removed it. My mood was below the floor level. There was only one option: mix more paint and make more touch ups.

i forgot to paint the small grille black. I am sure you did not notice 🙂

the black bosch öhlins decals were ruined beyond repair, so i was considering printing my own decals on a piece of transparent waterslide decal paper. I never did it because i had another idea.

I really liked how the car came out at the end, it was just couple of decals that were disturbing me. But since the color scheme was so varied it was not instantly visible.

Long story short I decided to make the car in "unwashed" condition which helped me to mask the sketchy spots 🙂 It was not an easy decision since once I am going this way there was no coming back.