Tag: Painting
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Hawker Sea Fury – Part Three – If You Look Very Carefully…

And I did. I did look carefully. And I’m glad I did. The external fuel tanks of the PM Models Hawker Sea Fury fit together very well. A lick of MEK, a clamp, and they were ready for sanding. And not a lot of that needed – the seams fit very well. As I had…
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The Little People

No, not leprechauns. Or dwarves or midgets or any other arbitrary divisions of the human race. I mean model figures that accompany our scale models. The denizens of the Little World. By rights they should be the ones we make the dioramas for, instead of with. They are the rightful owners of the scale. The casual…
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Never Mind Washing Your Hands

Wash your Handley Page. If you won’t do it carefully, just do it for the Halifax… We all need to wash our mitts more these days to prevent the transmission of the Wuhan Plague and hopefully we will all do so – but what we really need to do is wash our model kits better.…
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Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero – Part Six – It’s All A Whitewash

And all the better for it. Never mind whitewash in politics or on your back fence. When you whitewash a model it is a sign that you are getting somewhere. In this case it is Mr Base White 1000 diluted and blown on with a single-action airbrush. The white 1000 is about as good as…
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Mitsubishi Dinah – Part Two – The Bright Bird

I knew at the outset that the Dinah in IJAF trainer colours was rather special. The yellow is not the pure chrome of the RAF or RCAF trainers nor the red/yellow of a prewar US Navy aircraft wing – it has a distinct orange glow to it. I wasn’t sure whether the plastic that the…
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Avia S-199 – Part Four – Ol’ Stripey Tail

I appear to have learned something from my past experiences with Israeli fighter planes. This time I did not attempt decals for the rudder, electing instead to paint the 101 Squadron stripes. They have been very successful, and tempt me further to try to paint the rest of the ID stripes and Magen Davids rather…
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The Cockpit – Part Three – The Pen Is Mightier Than The Canopy

You’ve read before in this column about using a drafting pen as an instrument to paint the frames of a model airplane canopy. It is a perfectly valid technique – and one that I use all the time. If I am going to attach the canopy later with PVA glue, I can sit with it…
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Hot And Wet

I used to dream of this, but times have changed. Now I dread it. It stops the fun. Perth, Western Australia is occasionally hot – very hot. It is also occasionally wet – very wet. Both of these weather conditions are a signal to go somewhere and do something…but it is generally to the pub…
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Tupolev SB2 – Part Three – The Gallows…

I never realised how much my painting stand looked like a gallows tree until I hung the Tupolev SB2 on it for undercoating and colour coats. Didn’t mean to be quite so morbid… But the fact that the SB2 was suspended there and took its paint so well pointed out the basic utility of the…
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The Scale Modelling Culture

Or ” How I learned to cut throats on a green plastic mat “. As scale model builders we mess with the ideas of popular culture all the time. The vast majority of the population who have never built anything smaller than an IKEA bookshelf have no idea what closely focusing on a fresh kit…
