The Little World

I found myself agonising again in the paint aisle of Hobbytech. Not at prices or the paucity of paint – far from it. The prices are reasonable enough but the range of paints available is far greater than my discriminatory mechanism can cope with. I am past spoilt for choice – I am made anxious by it.

The current problem is to decide whether the SMS range of pre-thinned lacquers is a better choice than the Mr. Color range. I have deliberately stopped casting eyes over Tamiya and Mr. Hobby aqueous acrylics as these would only seem a retrograde step after coming to lacquers. There are a number of pots of these water-based paints to use up here at the Little Workshop and it will be all my self-discipline can do to make me use them up before I switch to solvent-based colours. It is a palette of transition at present and that means a doubling up on thinners and brush cleaners.

The SMS, as I mentioned, is pre-thinned and works out to a similar price in comparison to the Mr. Color range when you add in the price of the Mr. Color Leveling thinner needed to cut it for the airbrush. I note that there is specific thinner for the SMS and also a brush cleaner, but I already use Supercheap Auto lacquer thinner for the clean-up…and the pre-thinning seems effective, if the test bed shoots were anything to go by.  However this might leave a person in a bad position if there were touch-ups that needed to be done with a brush.

Nevertheless, the first perusal of the rack seems encouraging. I count interior colours for Allied as well as Soviet and German aircraft, as well as the classic external greens, greys, browns, and blues. There is even a premixed RAF Azure and a PRU blue. The only way to tell is to get a couple of bottles of a suitable camo mix and just spray a plane. Fortunately, the manufacturer recommends the same size nozzle as I use on one of my guns and the pressure range is the same that I use for the thinner GSI Creos paints. One of the particular attractions of this pre-mix route is the fact that one doesn’t need to mix extra paint for a job – just squirt more in from the bottle as required and you should be working with the same consistency each time.

Pray for me. If it all goes well I have a new instrument to play upon. If not, I have sacrificed a cheap model. At least no-one goes to the police and complains when you do that with scale model airplanes – when you do portraits in the studio, throwing one of the live models in the trashcan gets the police all upset…