The Little World

The English firm Colman’s made their fortune in mustard. There’s probably a biblical analogy in there somewhere, but the idea that always stuck in my mind was that they really made their fortune on the amount of the product that people left on the side of their plate.

It’s strong mustard; we all take too much, start out with a big bit – suffer for our folly – and then use the rest sparingly. And then we forget the lesson and do the same the next time. And Colmans made enough mustard to need railway waggons to transport it.

I’m starting to think Tamiya and Creos have the same business model with their acrylic paint. I look in dismay at the amount swilling around the bottom of the airbrush pot after I have finished a coat on a new model – and it doesn’t seem to make a difference if it is colour or varnish.

It goes in the waste bin, as I’ve been cautioned that pouring thinned material back into the stock jar will ruin the rest. I sometimes cast about for something else to spray, but my activities are generally one model at a time and there isn’t a suitable subject. The cat does not approach the Little Workshop anyway. Not that I would…

The business of pipetting the raw paint out of the jar with a used plastic straw works well, but you still need to accurately predict how much will be needed for any particular job – and you need to make sure that you’ll not run out 3/4 of the way down the fuselage and have to do a hasty re-mix. It will just be a matter of accurate estimation and then marking the side of the straw in one cm increments nd finding out how this correlates to the plastic eyedropper for the thinner.

Or shift to Vallejo pre-thinned stuff…but then you need to entirely shift your thinning. Better the devil I know and a few drops wasted.

At least I did pick up one useful thing from the YouTube boys in the UK. I now dispense a small amount of pure colour for brushwork into a stainless steel cup and re-close the main jar – the rest of the paint in the jar seems to be retaining its consistency far better than before.

And unlike Colmans mustard, using paint doesn’t make the inside of your nose burn and your eyes water – at least if you don’t poke yourself with the back end of the brush…