Category: Acrylic
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Either Shit Or Climb Off The Pot

Come with me to my local hobby shop – my happy place. Tool aisle, car aisle, kit aisles, paint aisle…as many wonderful aisles as one could want. In these post-viral days we are instructed to leave a metre and a half between us and other people while sometimes wearing a mask. I do this, and…
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Whether or Not…

To weather. Is it better to slosh muck over your model or leave it gleaming? Only you can tell – but be aware that others will want to tell you what to do. So listen to me… I presume you are engaged in the hobby of scale model building. If I am wrong – if…
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Dornier Do-17Z – Part Four – Kenttävihreä

Gesundheit. Here, have a tissue. It actually means Olive Green and the information sheet I have assigns an FS number to it: FS34096. There are the numbers on Mr. Color paint jars as well as those of other makers, but none seem to be exactly the same colour. I have elected to try my luck…
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I Choose My Paints From The WTF Numbering System

It is the favoured organisational system of the major model paint makers. They each invent a complete system for their paints that has no relation to that of other factory. This means they can all stay in their corner of the playground at recess. And when I want to paint a modern jet that has…
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A Thousand Pictures Are Worth A Word

And that word is generally : ” inaccurate “… In a world awash in internet images, the scale modeller could be forgiven for thinking that they’ll never have a problem with colour again. All they’ll have to do is google up an image of the prototype they’re building and copy the picture. This is as…
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The Smell Of Victory

You’ll all remember the line from Apocalypse Now about napalm attacks. It harks back to my earliest modelling days when the smell of turpentine filled the house every time I painted. Those were enamel days – Pactra, Testors, and Humbrol. There was a fair range of quasi-lacquers as well from Revell that had a distinctive…
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Grey, Gray, Grau, Gris, Seryy

Not the weather – it’s actually nice out. I mean the undercoat. I use the Mr. Surfacer pots blown through a single action airbrush. Others use Tamiya rattle cans or similar material from different makers. Few of us realise the miracle that occurs when we do. Initially I thought that spraying an undercoat was just…
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Fokker D VII – Part Three – A Kid At The Club

True to my original promise, I started the Revell Fokker D VII as if I was an adolescent. I took it to the club and set upon it with the pots of paint supplied; one red and one blue. I also cracked three other colours from the general stock to improve the details, but the…
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Craquelure

The word is from the art world and it describes a fine network of lines or cracks in the surface of an oil painting. This is observable in most famous paintings in galleries and is not considered a fault. However, when it invades our scale model workshop it is to be deplored. We may be…
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Dirt Rich

As a kid I encountered the term ” dirt poor “. A lot of you know it as well – though we probably wouldn’t describe ourselves as such if we are building scale model kits or reading this on a computer screen. I would like to introduce a new phrase: ” Dirt Rich “. It…
