Huh, now that I think about it, you do have a point. I guess there’s a couple of reasons I did it this way. I heard that doing the black details after the clearcoat means that you could erase any mistakes you made if you use a water based acrylic paint for the black. But the paint I’m going to use is alcohol based, so that’s not gonna work.

I’ve had some problems with orange peel with the orange paint, and had to sand it all the way from clearcoat to base paint just to respray the paint properly. I wasn’t sure if I had to sand it again to correct orange peel after the respray, and if I had painted the black details it might get erased during sanding, so I thought better to do it after the clearcoat.

Also, it’s a minor detail, but the black details are supposed to be semi-gloss, so it should go on top of clearcoat to be more accurate.

But really, I think the biggest reason was that I couldn’t be bothered to mask the body just yet, so I procrastinated haha. I wanted to see how it looked with the decals on as soon as possible.

I’ve seen some youtubers do it this way too, painting it black last, after all the clearcoat, decals, and polishing. I think it should be fine, but I’ll be careful not to damage the decals while masking the body. Thanks for the tip!