Reflections on 2019

Happy new year to you as well.

This last year has been perhaps the best year yet for me overall (becuase the other ones weren’t that good). I now anxiously await for the arrival of a spray booth some time in January. When I started using an airbrush I had a good start I think. I spent time experimenting and trying out things, before trying to airbrush my first model, so I got the necessary practice for troubleshooting, testing and cleaning the airbrush. I even built and used my own spray booth (marginally ok), but I chose to toss it when I moved lately, and I did not get to order a new one until December this year.

Some things to remember the next time I pick up the airbrush: (They say it ought to look similar to low fat milk.)
1) Properly thin the paint (most important, somehow my paint looked thinned out, but it probably wasn’t)
2) Adjust air pressure to distance to model, and always do some test painting using the newly thinned paint.
3) Once again try working with gloss coats, ideally, getting a smooth result. It probably helps gently knocking down each layer of paint with very fine sand paper (sanding any raised edges will likely remove all paint), before starting adding the few layers of gloss coat. Adding a layer of varnish helps remove the toy-like look of the gloss coat, and also hide some of the imperfections in the gloss coat when the shinyness is dialed back to sating or more matte again.

I hope to try out some weathering and use of both washes and pigments. I’ve only so far used basic Tamiya panel line accent color (enamel). So many things I want do do. Perhaps the most interesting, when it gets done, is scribing into primed paint (as opposed to scribing into plastic) for this ugh-raised-panel-line-but-still-cheaper-Viggen-kit in 1:48 scale.

I managed to squeeze in a last effort purchase online yesterday, as I found a local store online selling some paint and pigments at a nice discount. Maybe they hoped I would buy a kit as well, but I couldn’t afford it. Last kit I ordered was a pleasant surprise, though item is still on its way: Kinetic F-16XL2 (two seater). Very nice price (for being a local store), and new molds, and presumably very good quality. Interestingly enough, the online store also had the Skunkworks version of the F-16XL (single seater), but I went with the Kinetic one, as it was newer, and the Skunkversion one is based on the Kinetic molds anyway.