Category: Painting
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The Puppy And The Old Dog
Makes you nostalgic, eh? We start with such high hopes and so much precision. then we encounter The Kit From Hell and the bottle of nuclear waste thinner and it all goes wrong. As the years go by the mat gets punished for our sins but the models get better. We watch as markings disappear…
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If I Can See It
You win. If the enemy can see it – you lose. Basic rule of camouflage. And it is also a principle to remember when building a scale model for display – especially for public exhibition. If you want ’em to look, attract their eye. This is a challenge for the modeller who is depicting a…
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Soviet Hound – Part Three – Delicacy Rears its Ugly Head
Or is it a frugal conscience? Or just inability to mix paint right? I wondered this as I inspected the Mil 4 model this week after spraying the grey undercoat. I had run out of Base White 1000 – my preferred undercoat for models that are going to be white or yellow – and was…
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Pilatus PC-21 – Part Four – Decal Phobia
Fear of water-slide transfers, if you wish to be pedantic… It strikes us all at one time or another. We see a commemoration scheme on the box lid and are lured into getting a kit with complex curved surfaces. The real-life plane or vehicle is painted by professionals with masks, spray guns, and a lot…
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Pilatus PC-21 – Part Three – The Double Mask
The look of this Swiss trainer in RAAF service is a bit daunting – all that colour and complex markings. Yet, like every paint job in the world, it yields to careful study of individual parts. You just have to mentally look past the complex decals to the basic colours – red, blue and white.…
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Pilatus PC-21 – Part One – Serendipity
The definition of the word links random occurrences that produce a beneficial result – in short good luck. It has started for me with the donation of this new kit. The firm that makes it – 3D Blitz Models – seem to be Swiss. This will be one of the few occasions when I have…
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The Curse Of The Rivet
The curse of the riveted kit is most often seen with the older moulds. The days were when it was simpler to represent the details of an aircraft fuselage or wing by drilling minute depressions in the mould block. Everyone did it, and only in the last 20+ years have they made an effort to…
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Hawker Typhoon 1B – Part Three – Bombphoon
The Best That Could Be Done. There are some kits that you can build to the max of the craft. Others are on a lesser level – they can be to the max of your skill or the max of their limited potential, As long as you get to one of these points, you have…
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Too Hard?
Possibly. But remember that clean joints and clear canopies were too hard when you were 11 years old. You are now 67, and all the joints are good and all the canopies are clean. Life has progressed, and so have you. If the scheme on the colour call-out looks impossibly complex, do not worry. Take…
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Pre-Coloured Model Kits
We already see some surprisingly precise model kits in the 1:144 scale that have been pre-painted or colour printed. They are generally the tinier fighter planes and the schemes are simplified, but for all that, the kits go together well and the end result looks at least as good as a a die cast example.…
The Little World 