Thus far I have been building my model kits by PAINTING everything first with an airbrush before snapping together. This means, of course, that I CANNOT get any puttying, sanding etc. done - if I did I would spoil the paint finish.
But I *do* want to get rid of seam lines, potholes and the like. I really do. Does this mean that I have to mask every &^$#@%&^$#@ thing? I guess kits these days have fewer and fewer seams that require sanding, but some of them are still pretty obvious.
Incidentally, is it true that anything on earth can be masked, given enough patience?
SECOND QUESTION:
This pertains to test-fitting. Looking through all the WIP builds on MW and on other sites, I notice that somehow everyone test-builds/test-fits their kits before putting on the paint. So my question is this: do modellers actually do the whole cut-the-male-part-diagonally-across thing when they are test-building? Does that not take up an IMMENSE amount of time? If not, how are these super-duper modelers doing their test fitting? I would like to test-fit too, but the cut-male-part-diagonally-across thing seems to be really inefficient, time wise.