If you look extremely carefully at the left-most picture, you'll see a hole in the topside of the starboard phaser bank masking.  This whole thing happened because I made a mistake in the mask.  The middle and right pictures show what it looks like now, hopefully a decent correction.

     The steps to this mistake were:

• leave hole in mask
• paint phaser strips
• paint hole in mask same color as the hull by hand using a brush
• remove masking after everything had time to dry

     The above steps left too much wet paint in contact with the smallest masking tape for too long, which in turn resulted in the adhesive adhering to the hull!  This is not unlike taking rubber cement and putting a little drop here, a little drop there...

     Needless to say it was horrible to try and fix (which I am desperately hoping I did satisfactorily).  You can't sand it off because it goops up the sandpaper on the first swipe.  This being the case, I took the smallest and sharpest dental tool and scraped over it (for an hour) and removed it bit by goopy bit.

     I then had to try and replicate the Aztec pattern I made with an airbrush by hand!  With a little practice from drybrushing the sensor panels, I think I did an alright job but I know it's not perfect.  I'm hoping that after the gloss and flat lacquer are applied (from decaling) that the difference will be negligible.

     I also painted the Aeroshuttle in this step.  The instructions were insufficient, so I spent a little time doing some research and trying to match the Aeroshuttle correctly.

Reference images courtesy of Ex Astris Scientia (http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org)

     I used the above images to try and get the phaser bank color and Aeroshuttle correct.  It's alright that the reference model looks so very much better than mine - it's the studio model and it's bigger then I am!  :)