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Anyone know an easy way to do the red lines on marine helmets to represent they are a trooper?

Carefully?

Honestly, this is one of those things that overall will be easiest/simplest/most rewarding doing by hand. You could mess around using tape to make nice straight lines, or making up a stencil or some other such contrivance. But I think you'll find that just taking your time and and being careful about painting red lines on the helmets will be the easiest path.

And if you've got a couple of dozen to do, I imagine you'll quickly find yourself getting rather good at it.

Yep! A small brush and a steady hand are all that’s needed. Have your base color handy in case you make the stripe too wide so you can paint back over it a bit.

When you peal an apple or a potato, you hold it with both hands and use short repetitive controlled motion mostly with fingers.

When you write a letter, you have you hand solid on the table while your fingers use short repetitive controlled motion with fingers.

Same here, position your hands so they are resting solid on stable surface, and you will be painting only with short controlled repetitive motion where the only thing that moves are the three fingers that hold the brush.
So, You painting hand only micro moves the brush up and down, but holding hand will move the model into the position to have the brush connect with the model. Painting hand stays stable, holding hand moves and positions the model.

Sometimes, for extra fine detail, I do not trust my holding hand, and will leave the model on the table, and brace the paintbrush with both hands to make the micro brush strokes.
That is the fastest and easiest way, given that you have some practice.

I do not imagine masking or stamping will be faster or cleaner or easier.
Wish you luck.

When you find out the best method, please let me konw as well. I'm hella OCD and dont trust my hands due to poor eyesight. So far, havent been able to find a good "stencil" based solution. Experiments with masking tape haven't been good, spillage is always a concern.. I'll keep looking though!

The trickiest part IME, is the RT beakie stripe which tapers towards the tip of the helmet - its not uniform in its thickness. Having said that, there are at least two variants to the stripe I know of - one that's more triangle-ish and another, which is more teardrop-shaped in its taper. RT-era artwork seems to use both pretty interchangeably..

One "cop out" alt style I know, is a line which only goes on the top half of a beakie helmet. Such stripes were done on some RTB01 images in the RT rulebook, and it also looks pretty cool. A lot easier to pull off

(yes, I think about this stuff too much)

I just do the helmet top stripes, not the beaks. Which makes it easier.

As others have said, a steady hand and practice. Brace your model/hands/wrists, relax, etc. It also helps to be sure of your orientation. Look at the model straight in the eye, make sure you are not painting on an angle. Depending on your colors, it can be useful to put down a base coat for the stripe. Not all paints cover well, so instead of multiple layers of yellow, for example, you might want to put down something like grey seer or a good off-white/grey first.

Basic stripes are not hard once you get used to them. The cross hatching for vets or secondary stripes for sarges are where the real fun is at...

Good luck!

My thanks for the feedback, tips, and suggestion. It looks ultimately i need secure the model on something more stable and it should help some. Also maybe sketch it out with a pencil and slowly build the line with multiple strokes instead of one long stressful line over and over.

Also? One option I've been thinking about are paint markers. Many hobby paint manufacturers make them now. In fact, I'm thinking I probably want to give this a shot for doing stripes in general, as I find using a pen much easier for precision work than a brush..

For a red stripe on blue, I'd probably go with some other well covering light colour (peach? white and yellow cover very pporly most times..), and then just paint over that with a diluted red acrylic (think more like staining the underpaint red, not covering it with another full paint layer)

 Severed79 wrote:
My thanks for the feedback, tips, and suggestion. It looks ultimately i need secure the model on something more stable and it should help some. Also maybe sketch it out with a pencil and slowly build the line with multiple strokes instead of one long stressful line over and over.

I’m a big fan of GW’s old paint handles. Not tried their new ones, or any from the number of people out there who make them. There are a lot of options on the market. Or something as simple as using sticcky tack to hold the mini to an empty paint pot/pill bottle/cork.

So much nicer then just holding the model by the base with your hand while you paint.