What do you mean by
tissue coverings?
The great thing about this hobby is that there are so many facets of it! Building, designing, electronics, science, photography, art, you name it! With my graphic design background it was not long until I started to try and find a way to use those skills with my RC aircraft hobby. I also had no skills as an airbrush artist, all my art skills were wrapped up in applications like Photoshop and Illustrator. Being able to take those creative skills and apply them to RC aircraft, especially foam aircraft soon became a goal of mine. Ok, so maybe it's not a new idea, “stick and tissue” has been around a long time. But in that case the tissue was usually going to be painted on and I wanted something where the tissue already had the “paint” on it. Therefore giving me the venue I sought after. I was also more interested in covering foam aircraft than the balsa skeleton of the traditional modeling genre. Hence, "Skins" were born! After many trial and errors, it was with the help of SGTalon the issues of weight were finally minimized to the point of making skins a viable option. Soon first flying skinned model made its appearance, the Enterprise-D!
Skins are printed on an Epson WorkForce 1100 Wide-format (13X30) printer with pigmented ink. Tissue paper is temporarily attached to a carrier sheet so it will run through the printer. After printing, the tissue paper is removed from the carrier sheet. The tissue skins are glued to the foam by using a watered down method of a white glue called Decoupage. Although not water proof, the pigmented ink makes the print water resistant, enough to tolerate the glue. Decoupage is available in Matt and Gloss depending on the finished look you want.
Making plain foam awesome...
....with tissue!