Category: Colour Schemes
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Curtiss SBC-4 – Part One – The Old Photo In The National Geographic
I used to pore over wartime copies of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I found a trove of them in a school library in the 1960’s and read all I could. I wasn’t after pictures of native girls with bare chests – I wanted colour photos of fighter planes. NG had access to the US Navy and Kodachrome…
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Imagination Is The New Word For Lying To Yourself
If you’re a fan of Facebook or any other general social media site you’ll have seen the memes that encourage you to imagine things. Many of them will have mountain scenes or unicorns and rainbows. I came from Alberta and used to live in the Crows Nest Pass, so I can testify to the accuracy…
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Grey Is Not Gray
And unfortunately, it’s not grey, either. At least not the grey it was a minute ago. If the colour call-out sheet calls for grey, start sweating early. It will sometimes specify which grey it wants, but just when you think you’re safe, you’ll discover that it specifies it by: a. A paint maker’s paint number.…
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Yak 3 – Part Four _ Speed Is As Speed Does
When you are not bending up connecting rods from brass PE sheets for a 1/72 kit, it seems to go a lot faster in the construction. Not as liable to win Best-of-Show at the Anorak Expo, but you have to be realistic. And Hobby Boss are the most realistic moulders I know. The Yak 3…
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North American Yale – Part Two – Cage Fighting
Or fighting with a cage, if you prefer. The business of welding together a plastic cockpit frame inside a plastic fuselage. Faint hearts need not apply. I have served my cage apprenticeship on a Special Hobby Avro Anson with a resin tubing structure and as a result I have been excused several centuries of Purgatory.…
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North American Yale – Part One – Exact Fit
When you find a pair of shoes that fit exactly – and they are on special sale – and you have the money – you owe it to your feet to buy them. And the same applies to model kits. I know I’m preaching to the choir here – I mean it’s model kit builders…
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Pinkish Semi-High Intensity Green-Brown
Or The Colour That Time Forgot. The most accurate recreation of something that never existed outside a paint designer’s cheese dream. It has no FS number but that’s okay – IPMS approves of it. The question of the right shade of puce to paint a Percival that has pancaked in Portsmouth has always been a…
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Using Up The Mashed Potatoes
When you open your refrigerator are you faced with shelves full of Tupperware containers? And in each one of them there’s a portion of something you ate earlier in the week? And none of the containers hold enough of anything for a feed? What do you do? Why you tip everything into a fry pan,…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Four – It Was A Good Idea At The Time…
Plywood wing, tube-frame fuselage, tiny 4-cylinder engine. What could possibly go wrong? Well you have to hand it to Hillson Praga. They were stylish. The little Air Baby looks good from many angles, and if the history of the type in Australia is to be believed, the three examples that got here were successful. Part…
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Ruritania Poste – Part Five B – RT-AFR
Purists amongst the aviation game may wonder at the slight anhedral exhibited by RT-AFR …the new SM.79 that Ruritania Poste has added to the African mail route. The answer is simple. The Savoia Marchetti is depressed. Wartime service for the Italians and now having to fly over cannibals and savage lions of post-war Africa …and…
The Little World 