FINAL THOUGHTS
H
aving seen the fi rst stages of my build of the incredible Airfi x
1:24 Hellcat in this issue of MAI, I thought I’d show you
how I’m speeding up the process of painting such a large
model, against such a tight deadline. As I only use Tamiya
and Gunze paints for work, each colour obviously has to
be individually mixed and thinned as needed and as you can imagine,
for such a large model, that means that I have to mix a lot of paint!
For the Hellcat, that has also meant the creation of some shades that
I can’t achieve off the shelf, so they needed to be carefully mixed and
colour matched in relatively large amounts so that I didn’t run out half
way through the build and so the need to store those batches of mixed
colours, became an issue.
With all of this in mind, I bought several boxes of dropper bottles from
Amazon, each of which holds two bottles of either Tamiya or Gunze
paint, along with the necessary thinners to spray each colour without
further work. So far I’ve only fi lled the bottles with paint needed for the
Hellcat, but will over the next few weeks add to their number with other
colours that I regularly use. I will then have a complete set of thinned
colours that are just topped-up as and when. Here you can see some of
the colours, especially the three that I used for the interior: dark green
base coat, Interior Green and then a highlight shade, all three being
used over all of the interior sections and the engine bay. Not only has
this made it easy to grab what I need quickly, the use of the dropper
bottles allows me to refi ll the airbrush cup without putting it down, it
being easy to remove the lids of the bottles with one hand with little fuss
or mess. In fact, I wish I’d thought of doing this before..!See you next time. ■JUST TRYING TO
MAKE LIFE EASIER... Written by Spencer Pollard