Hooligan repainted as Skywarp

I decided to go with very light grey instead of white for this repaint for the simple reason of ease of paint use. The white paints I have available are either too thin, requiring a dozen layers to cover the real hue of the plastic, or are too goopy. The light camoflage grey dried evenly and coated completely in only three layers. And a thin layer of orange paint turned the cockpit the right color while still allowing it to be translucent.

I attempted to use masking tape to keep the wing stripes straight this time, since I didn't have to worry about painting the wings themselves (they start out black, and Skywarp's should be black), but it didn't work too well, and I ended up having to do a lot of touchup work anyway.

One procedure I finally clued into this time was to take my X-Acto knife and drill out the openings of the various shoulder area pieces where the metal bars go through. Not widening the holes completely, mind you, just making a sort of conical entryway, which made it MUCH easier to fit the metal pins back in place when I was done.

A warning about methods used to coat your paint work, which I discovered while working on Skywarp. While nail polish topcoat makes for a good protectant, DO NOT spray any sort of other sealant on top of it. The spray coat will buckle as it dries, leaving air pockets between it and the nail polish that result in a grey mottling. Nail polish on top of spraycoat is fine, however.

Finally, I turned Hooligan's spare missile into an energon axe. First I whittled the tip down to a reasonable size, then I built the blade out of Sculpey and cooked it on top of a lightbulb (this is a fire hazard, and not recommended if you have better facilities). I painted the blade purple, then drybrushed a layer of light blue over it, followed by wetbrushing a bit of water in the middle of the blade face so that the light blue would retreat to the edges. I painted the rest gunmetal. You may notice a bit of orange showing on Skywarp's fist...this is because I had to drill out the hand hole to allow the axe haft in.