Tag: Painting
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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…
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The Rattle-Snake

The aerosol spray can…the rattler…has been with us for decades. I remember Pactra and Testors hobby cans in the 1960’s that finally brought the ability for a kid to paint a model car to a realistic finish. The realism was that of car lacquer colours and as garish as any hot rodder could have desired.…
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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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Yak 3 – Part Four _ Speed Is As Speed Does

When you are not bending up connecting rods from brass PE sheets for a 1/72 kit, it seems to go a lot faster in the construction. Not as liable to win Best-of-Show at the Anorak Expo, but you have to be realistic. And Hobby Boss are the most realistic moulders I know. The Yak 3…
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Hillson Praga Air Baby – Part Two – The Human Dimension

Or perhaps that should be human dimensions. The small size of people reflected in the small size of aircraft. You wouldn’t think that with a lot of kits – the fighters, bombers, and transports of WW2 are a level bigger than their counterparts in the interwar period – and these again bigger than the WW1…
