Tag: Painting
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Bright Or Blight?

Are the colourful liveries spoiling us? If you are a scale hot rod or custom car builder, just quit reading now. This column has nothing to tell you. If you are an armour person, you can also go make a dark brown cup of coffee with flakes of rust in it. If you are an…
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Savoia Marchetti SM.81 – Part Four – Stop Laughing

This is serious. That’s an Australian joke, for the overseas readers. For the locals, its a historic Australian cartoon. Go look it up. The Bulletin long ago. In my case the risible arose because I needed to occlude the window spaces of the Pipistrello before painting. I’d deliberately left out the bulls-eye plastic windows that…
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Swiss F-5E – Part Two – Thank You, I Think…

I puzzle sometimes – at the decisions that the model making companies take when they design a mould. I cannot influence or gainsay them – they are providing the kits that I love to build. But the question of ” why ” comes up more than you’d think. Take the nose of the Northrop F-5E.…
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Caudron C-445 – Part Four – Hi Yo Silver?

We have a problem, Kimo-sabe. Which silver? There are more choices in my paint rack than I care to admit. I see several super-lacquer from GSI Creos that claim to replicate stainless steel, iron, super silver, and titanium. The regular line has fine silver, silver, and shine silver. I have mixed a custom silver-grey. Some…
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Patience is A Virtue

Or so we are told – by people who want to get in front of us in line at the petrol station. It is also preached for the scale modeller – by makers who give you tank tracks made up of 6 plastic parts per link or sheets of infinitesimally small brass etched parts. Their…
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Fourteen Little People

I approach the exercise of painting figures with trepidation. There are so many better painters that I feel I am a fraud. Yet I need pilots for my aircraft and spectators for my air museum. So it is either paint the inexpensive figures or pay for the ready-mades…and these are very often at a price…
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The Half Sticky Stickum

We all go down the aisle of the hobby shop and look for a way to spend our money…even if we don’t have a lot of it at the time. Don’t guffaw and pretend that you haven’t done exactly that. If you’re reading this you have come home occasionally with a left-handed canopy chopper or…
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Lockheed Hercules – Part Six – Three Tones of Torture

It is difficult for me to express how much I detest the designer of this colour scheme. I know that he or she must exist, but did I have my way, they would shortly not. If I were a freehand camo sprayer all this would be simple. Three pots of Mr. Color and a pleasant…
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Lockheed Hercules – Part Five – Paint By Numbers

The Bob Ross School Of Aircraft Camouflage Or how I learned to hate the RCAF airframe finishers. Because they used three colours on the CC-130. They only did it this one time, but that was one time too many. The three-grey camo for this plane is a one-off. It was apparently thought to be something…
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Beaufighter TFX – Part Two – The 50’s Revisited

The quality of the Airfix Beaufighter is actually quite good when you get to the cut and glue stage. You must imagine the insides, but then you do that when you study anatomy as well and at least the kit doesn’t smell of formalin. All seams fit well, though I suspect the silver plastic used…
