Category: Painting
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You Can Be Damned
So can I, and all we need to do is pick up the wrong pot of paint. The colour question has divided people for centuries… and no more so than in the hobby shop. The number of paints available to camouflage toy airplanes is exceeded only by the number of people who claim to know…
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Too Many Decal Systems
Too many to make your hobby shop choice an easy matter. And that’s the way it is with scale model chemicals – whether that is paint, cement, or polish – in the 21st century. We might have passed cheerful childhoods with tube cement, tinned paint, and a bottle of turpentine, but we ain’t going to…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part Three – The Clean Machine
I suspect I could not have used this title two minutes after the ground crew swung the propeller for this French fighter. The exhaust provisions for the rotary engine seem to be two oval holes cut into the lower portion of the engine cowling. Given the castor oil thrown out by the motor plus the…
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Nieuport 24Bis – Part Two – French Silver-Grey
The colour that never stops giving. Or changing, for that matter. The FS-G pot is a standard GSI Creos bottle that possibly started life as a silver. But at some stage of the game a colour call-out asked for a duller shade and some black or grey was dropped into it. Then it got too…
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The Underside
And differences in opinion. Nothing is more striking when looking at aircraft camouflage than the variety of colours and shades that the different air forces used under the Plimsoll line. A glance at any of the Profiles books, a visit to an air museum, or the call-out sheets from any kit maker show colours like…
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Junkers Ju-86 – Part Three – Lady Anne Barnard
Of course you name a German bomber after a Scottish lady of the Georgian period who walked up Table Mountain. Perfectly normal, what? And so they did – this Junkers-86 K passing from the South African airline to the South African Air Force when war commenced and the South Africans decided which side they wanted…
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Junkers Ju-86 – Part Two – The Four-Part Scheme
You have no idea how hard it was to resist writing ” Four-play “… The horror I experienced painting my first four-part camouflage scheme still exists in my display cabinet – wrapped around a Morane-Saulnier fighter of the French air force in early WW2. I was relying upon a back-of-packet colour call-out and masking fluid.…
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Is It Light Into Dark?
Or the other way around? I can’t remember the correct sequence for mixing custom colours that need several hues or shades in one pot. Do I put light drops into a dark base or vice versa? I ask this because I need a purple for the top of a WW1 German aircraft and there are…
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Canadian Valentine Tank – Part Four – Borden Baby
Or ” The Jolly Green Midget “. Say what you will about the green paint on this Valentine, it is the closest I can get to the distinctive colour on this tank and an adjacent Matilda as they sit in the CFB Borden museum right now. The colour illustrations that show these are taken in…
The Little World 