Category: Painting
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Extra Dark Sea Yellow-Pink

Or was that RLM Light Puce? Or Cockpit Poo Brown? Every source of information that one can access about authentic colours for scale models is based upon the opinion of the person who wrote it…and that may be perfectly valid, adequately valid, nearly valid, or a dog-bone lie. If it is connected in a commercial…
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The Great White West Is Not A Great White Waste

What’s white and cream and arctic and matt and gloss and lives in an old Patak’s curry paste jar? My new model paint, that’s what. And I think the most expensive component was the empty jar. I was up to the paint stage with my Air World museum buildings and they were daunting structures –…
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Whenever You Make A Model of Something…

Make a model of something. That is not just my entry into the fatuous statement of the year contest – it is the realisation that there are a lot of things that people do as modellers that are not helping themselves. Let me explain… a. If you essay to be a railway modeller, you need…
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The Only One Like It

If you are contemplating a big win in next year’s plastic modelling contest, I should get started now. Pop down to the hobby shop and pick up a totally exclusive, one-of-a-kind kit like a Mustang or Spitfire. And a packet of photoetched scale rivets for the detailing… There’s a fine point for the competitive modeller…
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When You See That Magic Lamp

We all succumb to the lure of the magic lamp occasionally. That moment when you see something exotic in the swirling waters at your feet and reach down and pick it up… The lucky ones drop it but the unfortunate ones rub and the genii comes out. Well, I avoided rubbing when I visited a…
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Handley Page Hampden – Part Three – Success Masquerading As Failure
Having overcome Part Two – the warp factor – I set myself the task of assembling the Hampden, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it cobbled together. The wing tabs were tight, but a little sanding loosened them and a little more sanding snugged the wing roots in close enough to the fuselage to…
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Not A Creature Was Stirring

Not even a modeller. Well…not this modeller, anyway. We all have brain breaks occasionally – we start out thinking fine and then one of the mental drive belts hops off a wheel and the next thing you know we’re Jim Carrey on a bender. It happens in the modelling workshop, too. Today, for instance. Time…
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” Is This Paint Gluten-Free? “

Don’t laugh too much. You never know where the trail of discovery will lead. I have been pondering this in my local store – Hobbytech – as I wander the paint aisle. It is much the same when I go to the big DIY chain store – Bunnings – and try to make sense out…
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The Cost of the Kit Is Not Included

I’m old. I can remember plastic-bagged 50¢ Airfix kits. I can remember the little brown vials of cement that came in the boxed kits. ( best cement ever…) I can remember life before acrylic paints… Old. But this doesn’t mean to say that I am feeble-minded – or that I can be persuaded to open…
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When In Doubt…

When in doubt, do it the way the original was done. There was generally a reason for this and you may have stumbled upon it again. Case in point: doing the second blue paint coat on the PRU Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The first coat had cured for a day, and the second one was due…
