The Little World

Whether ’tis nobler to load up the airbrush with two drops of paint or grasp a hairy stick and muddle over the part. To paint, perchance to drip.

As a young model builder my choice was no choice. if I had paint and a brush, on it went. Enamel paint, never thinned. Brush cleaned out with turpentine and gradually dying from the strain. Paint roughly where it was needed – with the application getting neater and flatter as I got older.

The small cans of Pactra spray lacquer were much later – as a teenager I could afford one can for two model cars and the purchases were few and far between. A lot of thinking went into the choice of the next can as it absorbed most of a week’s allowance.

Now I sport two airbrushes and can afford racks of paints. I can use both acrylic and lacquer. I have enough thinners to blow up the shed several times over. But I still ponder about whether I should go the spray or the brush,

I hasten to add this is on small parts. Obviously I use the airbrushes for major areas. I make as many mistakes doing so as is consistent with my character but overall I am winning. However…do I need to airbrsh the tiny bits?

Well, yes I do, if I am honest with myself. A lot of the tiny bits on 1:72 can be overborne by brush painting, particularly if the paint has real body to it. They benefit from the air spray. Yet air spraying tiny bits seems so very fussy.

I now stop at an early stage of the assembly line and analyse what colours will be required and where they will be needed. I’ve even gone so far as to assemble the paint jars and keep them with the model in the plastic organiser boxes that hold a build. And I’ll pore over the assembly instructions writing the actual colours near the parts – I find the business of defining colours with numbers a nuisance when the same instruction sheet also uses numbers to identify parts.

The planning lets me see which parts will be the same colour, and I can brigade them up on spray holders so that they can be done in the one batch. This means painting some on the sprue trees – and I thoroughly approve of this practise. It seems to be very economical of paint as well.

Of course there are always brush jobs. But I am slowly whittling them down to the very end detail bits – and frequently they will be on parts that are in place on the model.

What I do want to see is a tiny-cup air brush that will allow extremely small amounts of paint to be used. The less you spray, the easier the clean.