Category: Acrylic
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Night Or Day? When To Spray…

The working modeller has a dilemma when it comes to doing their spray painting: Whether it’s better to do so in daylight or under the artificial lights at night. This may sound like a fatuous statement, but consider these factors: a. Most people’s colour vision is more accurate in daylight. It is not biased by…
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Bristol Bulldog – Part Two – Well, They Don’t Fly Themselves, Eh?

I’ll amend that. The drones do…sort of. But in the case of the Bristol Bulldog, it needs a human pilot to defend the realm. Airfix have been good to us for a long time – nearly all of their kits have contained at least one crew member to steer the ship and/or make the sandwiches.…
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Red Sky At Night – Airbrusher’s Delight

Or was that in the morning? It’s so hard to tell with these old folk sayings. The people who say them to you are old folk and they generally forget what they came in the room for anyway… I had no idea when I embarked upon a life of chromatic crime – also known as…
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The Torture Rack

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…
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XF-7 Sky In The Morning…

Modeller take warning. They used to think that shepherds and sailors were the best folk meteorologists – reading the sky and waves for signals of storm or calm. Pooh – that’s nothing. Compared to modellers contemplating airbrush work, the sheep farmers and mariners might just as well be at the bottom of a mine. They…
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The Swiss Army Varnish

My workshop has a shelf in it for varnishes. Read that again. A whole shelf. I call it the Swiss Army Shelf because it has something of everything there – like a Swiss Army knife. And like the famous tool from the Alps, I suspect that about 89% of what’s on the shelf is useless.…
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Curtiss Helldiver – Part Three – Green Is The Colour…

As I have written before – it is the colour of my true love’s cockpit. But it is never the same colour as you see in the books, movies, or museums. It is never the same colour as other people use, and it is never the same colour twice. The only thing that cockpit green…
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Having A Thin Time Of It

Since returning to scale model kit building and taking on the whole airbrush thing, I’ve been steadily making discoveries. Many of them have been through the mechanism of mistake and regret, but I’m happy to say not all. Yesterday I got to pet the learning curve without it biting me in the ass. The question…
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A Childhood Ambition Realised

No, I will not be a fighter pilot, or a movie star, or a rich man. But I think I can say that I am acheiving a childhood ambition with my aero modelling. Not flying models, you understand – scale plastic models that sit on a shelf. My experience with flying models was and has…

