Tag: airbrushing
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Lid
Or, ” How Not To Flip Yours “… Over a period of years I have been painting with multiple airbrushes – my compressor unit has two output hoses. Starting with cheap kit guns and trigger actions, I have finally settled on two Mr. Hobby Procom Boy units. One is single action – on double. They…
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Sherman Tank – Part Three – Batch Processing
” Batch processing ” is the term we use in photography for editing one image perfectly, then commanding a computer program to make all the rest in the job the same. It saves an immense amount of post-processing time. ( Working with really lousy images is known as son of a batch processing…) It is…
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Damn The French
Not for their food, or wines, or railway trains – which are excellent. Not for their beautiful women or their wise philosophers. Damn them for their aero camouflage schemes. Particularly the three-colour ones used in the 1930’s and 1940’s. They are hell to paint. The colours are fine – I like grey undersides. British Sky…
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Kawanishi Norm – Part Three – Sprayin’ Weather
This last week has been good weather for spray painting. Clearish, dryish, and warmish…enough to be able to manage lacquers with regular thinner and also spray rattle cans of clear. The shop heater has been on to make a warm box but this is less of a problem now that I have overcome my fear…
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The Smell Of Victory
You’ll all remember the line from Apocalypse Now about napalm attacks. It harks back to my earliest modelling days when the smell of turpentine filled the house every time I painted. Those were enamel days – Pactra, Testors, and Humbrol. There was a fair range of quasi-lacquers as well from Revell that had a distinctive…
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Short Sunderland – Part Four – More Masks Than The Italian Banditti
I am not a mask person. They make me nervous – whether they are the Venetian Carnival sort or the plain ones worn by train robbers. I spent 30 years wearing them in surgery and I was generally up to no good there either… So when I need to mask for spray painting, you can…
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Gloss, Semi-Gloss, Semi-Satin, Satin, Semi-Matt, Matt, Flat
And all on the same model. Aren’t we a special modeller, then, eh? And these can all be produced by one spray-gun or brush. The most exciting times are when you try for one and get another. This is the point where your education comes in…because that is what has given you your vocabulary. If…
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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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Ol’ Stinky
In the social world of liquid masking agents, Humbrol’s Maskol is the one you rarely invite to the cocktail party. It is purple, stringy, and smelly. A lot like some people I know. I’ve tried it for masking camouflage patterns in 1:72 and found it to be problematical. It sticks, alright, but sometimes long after…
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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…
The Little World 