The Little World

No, this isn’t a Hammer film. I’m talking about the paint racks down at the hobby shop. Horror in 10 ml bottles.

The covid year and the shutdown of paint manufacture and shipping has certainly thinned out the racks. I hope it has not been too hard on the finances of the shopkeepers, and that they have discovered lines that sell really well. When the trade returns to normal they can use this knowledge to streamline the offerings.

I have not been hit too hard by the shortfalls…given that I can wrangle several brands of paint with much the same thinners and airbrush settings. I can also deal with more than one shop quite readily – as I’m retired I can buzz across town as I like. So far my workshop racks have no serious holes in them.

In actual fact I should have no holes anywhere – given the fact that a colour wheel shows you how the basic colours can be combined to make anything else. And gloss, satin, and matte are just varnish with three differing amounts of talc added.

It would be a far more worrying state of affairs if I had hitched my painting wagon to the Testor’s star. I am still amazed that a firm with as much of the market sewn up could instantly decide to go out of business. And this in a time when the hobby is booming during lockdowns. It smacks of business mis-management as much as the Wingnut Wings fiasco did.

One saving grace is the single-action airbrush I keep for varnishes and undercoats. It’s the equivalent of an adjustable rattle can that can take varying mixtures and blows the paint into a finer spray pattern. The market for spray cans is worse than that for 10 ml bottles and if you depended upon it for undercoat you’d be dry most of the time.

Note: I tried using up some of the old alcohol-based acrylic paints with the new lacquer thinner and so far they have sprayed wonderfully well. I have more paint than I suspected.