Layering With Solite

The glass I'm working over is a 1x2 foot flat cutting board. I would not suggest using anything with any texture as it'll make the following tricks difficult to do.

Here's a picture showing how I lay down each layer with little to no bubbles or wrinkles. I lay down a straight edge, keep the rest lifted, and swipe back and forth with my finger. I have no idea if this will still work with solite once the baby powder trick has been used on it as I don't do that.

This wing is the left wing of the Meridian. It'll follow the right wing which is something of a daytime scene. For this wing the colors are going from lighter to darker. I overlay some transparent blue for the next band of color...

... trim the blue to shape to be just larger than what size you want the color band...

... also, in this case, I trim the blue to match the curve of the silver. For these two colors, the right hand one will be transparent blue over silver and the second one will be double layered transparent blue.

Here's the second layer of transparent blue over both bottom pieces. Trim that to the outside curve of the bottom transparent blue and you're set. Note that I've not touched an iron for any of this and am strictly using the static cling to hold everything in place.

Here's the next color band - dark blue. I lay this down and use the bottom layers to cut away the same shape for the curve bordering the transparent blue and the dark blue. You can see the elevated line in this pic right where the light is reflecting. I run my knife along that.

Lift up the dark blue and move it such that it's overlapping the transparent blue by about 1/8"...

Oops... I knew I wanted a bigger piece of dark blue for some reason

Using the same technique I added in two more color bands - transparent blue over dark green (which makes a dark dark dark blue) and black. Just by coincidence this cutting board is the exact size of one Meridian wing panel so I suppose it's not 2 feet but more like 1 1/2.

I trimmed down the outside edges of the covering and used my iron over the entire thing. I really held back in no way. I literally ironed every square inch of covering on the board regardless of whether it was single, double, or triple layered. Ever-so-carefully lifting up the entire chunk, this is what I was left with (modeled by the lovely and talented Mrs Hunter).

I laid down the multi-color piece of covering over the wing and ironed it down as I would with any other piece. Note the wrinkles in this pic to show you that it doesn't need to be drum tight even though it's layered. Ignore the fact that the centers don't match up perfectly as that'll be hidden by the fuselage. I just wanted some more color on the left wing than the right wing covering angles would have allowed. Sorry about the fuzzy pic.

I used my handy-dandy heat gun for shrinkage and here's the final product. I was VERY careful with the heat gun around the covering band overlaps so as not to shrink the overlap back and make a gap.

Once caught onto, this technique can go rather quickly. The right wing was my first ever attempt at color layering and banding, and it took about 4 hours total. That includes a few redos. The left wing which I just detailed took a total of an hour to do, from concept to this pic.

The rest of the fuselage and tail feathers. I do most everything over glass now as it's such a nice way to cut out shapes without the covering floating all over the place. The circles such as the sun and moon (next pic) were done with various circular things I had laying around - the moon is from the lid off a can of micro-balloons. The sun is a scotch tape roll - that sort of thing.

The mountains and highlights were purely hand-cut with no real pattern other than to try and make them look as natural as I could.

Here's a pre-mountain shot of the bottom of the wing.

Note that I've done the majority of the black on the fuselage before adding in the mountains. Black and other darker solite colors lend themselves very well to doing this as the seams blend in nicely.

The moon was cut out on glass and I used a soft lead pencil to color in the seas. I then smudged it with my finger to soften the edges. The stars are yellow plastic model paint that I applied with a round toothpick.

Martin

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