Hello all,

I have steadily been working my way through making all the modelling mistakes I can contrive to discover and have now arrived at a point where the latest disaster that befell me has left me rather peeved (as this DVa has been turning out quite well so far (for me), even if I do say so myself).

I used gloss and matt paints on different parts and wanted an even flat finish overall so decided to spray on Humbrol matt acrylic varnish all over (I have a can of the aerosol stuff - my jar of dullcote has gone goo-ee and I dont like the finnish from that so much either, so I thought I'd try the rattle-can stuff). This worked ok except to my horror I found that the paint under one of my decals bled through it, discolouring one of my lovely edelweiss' . I have touched it up with paint but its only "passable" now (if I get another of the same kit I'll paint it over and put an new decal on).

I usually put a coat of future on before laying a decal and I think what I must have done wrong was to miss putting a coat of future under this particular decal, as the one on the other side of the fuselage is ok, and the paint has only bled through the decal, not overall. The paint was lifecolour, its an eduard decal, I dont think I put any decal fix down, if I did it would have been the humbrol stuff.

Does that make sense, i.e. a coat of future would have sealed in the paint and avoided the varnish making it bleed through the decal? and putting decal fix down over the future would not affect that seal? - I just wonder why the paint did not bleed into the different colour abbutting it, only through the decal.

Logically it seems to me that should be the case (ie a future seal would solve it all), but I'm just a bit paranoid about using my rattle can varnish again at the moment .

Did you seal the decals after they were applied ? Lacquer dull coat is very hot and will eat through causing these issues . When I put the decals on I always go back and seal with a few coats of future .

I had a problem with the Ju88 I'm building with the decals as well . Once they were in place all decals were sealed and after spraying the dull coat a few of the developed really bad wrinkles .

I'm puzzled on this as well and glad you brought this topic up .

Well, I did the paint and not less than a day or so after that put the decals on, quite a while ago, before spraying the varnish last night (so I know the paint was dry) and can't now exactly remember if I sealed over the decal or not but thinking back I suspect I probably did not, at least for the one side that was affected, because I knew I wanted a matt finish and was either going to leave off the future altogether, or put on a matt finish - and would have thought sealin with future was redundant if I was going to put on a varnish

- Thanks for the heads up that I do need to do that to protect the decal against some(?) varnishes Terri, I did not know that, guess I've been lucky up to now.

The odd thing is that it is only this one decal (and a very small part of the white edging of the cross next to it,) that was affected. As mentioned the decal on the other side, and those on the wings, were not affected and that (plus I have not had this happen on other decals I know I sealed up with future afterwards) made me think the problem was not sealing the paint under the decal - so the varnish wets the acrylic paint under the decal which then bleeds through the decal (or something like that), even though the paint had been left quite a few days (something like a week).

Thinking back, the paint was actually lifecolour red, with a Tamiya (not lifecolour) purple/violet band over it, then the decal on that.

I'm gonna religiously future everything from now on, and try that recipe for turning future matt with a bit of acrylic flat coat as an alternative to the flat varnich