As I was peeling the masking tape back and watching big chips of black paint come off, I just wanted to cry. I didn’t feel angry or frustrated, just absolutely defeated. I thought a lot about why it happened, and asked a few fellow modelers, and I still don’t understand what went wrong. Maybe the adhesive on the tape bonded to the paint, maybe something I did made the paint brittle, who knows. I’ve used the same masking process before and have never encountered anything like this. In some spots the paint didn’t chip, but it became tacky like it hadn’t dried.

So, faced with the prospect of stripping and painting the fuel tanks all over again or trying to fix each spot by either sanding or straight up painting over the chips, I chose to set it all on the shelf and come back to it at some point. Right now, I just need to have a few projects that I can execute and feel a sense of accomplishment again. I’ve been working on this kit since December 2018, and it’s just time to move on and get my confidence back up. I feel disappointed in myself (especially since the project before this was something I gave up on too), but I’ve been putting off a lot of models I want to paint, and I just need to move on. I haven’t finished a painted kit since October 2017 and that’s just WAY too long to go without the feeling of finishing something (except the Crossbone Ver Logic, but that was really done as more of a joke).