Hi Bill!
Yep, I knew I didn't want to attempt those completely free-hand if at all possible, especially up the glacis plate 'against the grain' of those wading vanes, so made a template, and dry-brushed the paint through the slots that I cut for doing this -
The paper was plastic laminated, so stronger than card stock itself, and wet-proof for my expected, multiple brush swipes (and as planning to be used for on at least these three BMP models). The template still looks good enough to use on other models if wanting to do more matching markings.
In making the template, I scored the underside of the lamination, on each side, sized for the width of the model, so it would 'box'-down and fit snuggly – then held it down flush for each dry-brush pass. It took about three passes up the slots to get the needed coverage in each area of the model (wet painting would have seeped right pass the stripe slots, but the dry-brushing behaved). ;)
Since the boxed sides were just bent down, I could open the template back up flat again to do the side stripes. There was hand-painting needed down in the recesses, and the turret stripe was free-handed, but duplicating the stripe position and sameness in look was needing something – mechanical.
It worked!
Previous models were free-hand painted (the template technique above I think looks closer to the hasty-roller or hand-brush means that these recognition markings are as field-applied).
Another neat visual effect of the stripes – if you need to glue a smaller turret to the hull (like the BTRs above), and you cock the turret off-line before its permanently set – at our tabletop viewpoint the unaligned stripe against the hull looks……"In Action".
Small details, some almost subliminal – that all start to add up.
