The Little World

What’s white and cream and arctic and matt and gloss and lives in an old Patak’s curry paste jar?

My new model paint, that’s what. And I think the most expensive component was the empty jar.

I was up to the paint stage with my Air World museum buildings and they were daunting structures – bigger than I had intended, yet appealing in a sort of Metropolis way. I printed windows on Pictorico inkjet plastic and settled on flat roofs, and it was all going well, but the size of the things was far more than the expensive Tamiya paint shelves at the hobby shop could supply. It called for ingenuity and frugality. It called for Leftover Man.

Leftover Man lept to the paint shelves at the back of the Little Workshop and rounded up anything that said ” white ” or ”  acrylic “. He shook, stirred, strained, and poured until everything went into the ex-curry paste jar and then set out with the graduated cylinder to dilute it to a brushwork consistency.

This was always the critical time – too thick and the surface suffers – and you run out of special shade paint half-way down the second-last wall. Too thin and it runs down the vertical surfaces and turns translucent. I added water to the mix in 10ml increments and tested the result each time on scrap foamcore.

Leftover Man also has lots of leftover brushes so he decided to sacrifice a couple to the paint god and do the grey concrete painting with an oil-based undercoat…then throw the smelly thing away. The walls were painted with a smaller throw-away, though this could be washed conveniently afterwards. All praise to the cheap Chinese plastic foam brush kit – they really are the answer for efficient large coverage.

Did it work? We shall see. The biting cold of the Little Workshop eventually drove him out and he’ll have to return when the sun warms the place. There’s half the walls yet to do and fortunately there’ll be enough White Combo to do it. Free is an ideal price for paint.