Airbrushing shoes

Last month Stevens International / AAA Hobbies / Megahobby.com gave free shoes to all employees. That was very generous! But when I went to get fitted, I didn't think to ask if they had other colors. Solid black might have been an option for these particular shoes, and I would have preferred that, since solid black shoes make my big feet look smaller. The white soles don't look too bad in this picture, but I decided it would be a quick fix to airbrush them with black lacquer, which should make a durable coating.

I had a bottle of already thinned Mr. Color C-33 Flat Black, and added some more lacquer thinner. First I had to out why no air was coming out of my Paasche H. Some paint had run back into the air nozzle last time and I hadn't noticed. Usually the only parts that need cleaning are the color cup, needle, and tip. Cleaning out the air nozzle was somewhat laborious, because the paint was well cured in there. I think it was also Mr. Color black lacquer. 

I started cautiously on the heel of the left shoe. Soon I started letting the paint flow more freely. I didn't know whether there was enough paint to cover and didn't feel like opening a second bottle, so I imitated the shading that was already on the shoe, just making it near to all-black instead of nearly all-white.

I also toned down the logos. The two shoes didn't come out exactly identical. The left heel isn't as dark as the right. I don't think it will draw attention (which was the purpose in the first place! I don't want my feet drawing attention). I did notice the Mr. Color is a warmer black than the material the uppers are made of. Next week I'll wear them to work, and see how durable the finish actually is

 

Sleestak Bust

This is a Jimmy Flintstone product. I finished it up just in time to take it to Wonderfest this year. Most of my time was spent cleaning up the mold seams running up the sides of the head and reestablishing the scales. After priming with Mr. Surfacer, I shot the eyes with Mr. Color gloss black, added a wash of reddish brown Vallejo Model Color (I don't recall what exact color), then brushed on a liberal amount of Quick Shine (which is the new Future, I guess. It dries to a nice hard shine, even though it's kind of milky in the bottle). Then I painted it with various Vallejo greens and ochre yellows, drybrushing successive layers. I mounted it on a block of rosewood with a length of acrylic rod.

The Wonderfest judges awarded it a Bronze, which is about right. It seems figures get Merit simply for a competently applied coat of paint, and paying attention to color modulation and variations of sheen from flat to gloss is enough to get you Bronze. If y'want more, do something special!

The picture at right is from the figure display case at AAA Hobbies in Magnolia, NJ.

Rest in Peace, Brig Gen Clarence E. "Bud" Anderson USAF (Ret)

I was saddened to find out from Max's Models YouTube channel, which I heartily recommend, that Bud Anderson passed away yesterday. He had one heck of a good run, though, with 102 years of a life well-lived.

Academy 1/72 P-51B, Bud Anderson's Old Crow

 At the age of 102, Clarence "Bud" Anderson is America's only living triple ace. I decided I'd build a replica of one of his planes, and Academy has a kit to let you do this right out of the box. I put the completed model on display at AAA Hobbies in Magnolia, NJ. Only two photos so far, more to follow.

I didn't quite build it out of the box, since having the gear up is not an option, and there's no pilot figure in the box.

First step was to make the main gear doors fit, which took some shaving down of the raised detail on the inner surface of the doors, and to cut away the tailwheel doors and widen the tailwheel opening to allow them to fit.

I didn't quite get the doors perfectly flush, so a bit of filler was required.

Lots of sanding and filling, using Bondo, Perfect Plastic Putty, and Mr. Surfacer. The fit between the cowling and lower wing would have been better if I had glued the lower wing to the fuselage before gluing the upper wing surfaces to the lower wing. As a result, I needed to fill in the lower wing behind the cowling tapering back to the landing gear bays.

Oops, sorry, no photos of the cockpit or the figure of then-Captain Anderson, which

I swiped from an Airfix P-51 (the new tool kit, so the figure's not bad). Here you see the primered model with Vallejo masking fluid over the canopy. I like the Vallejo product much better than Microscale Micro Mask, which beads up on smooth surfaces. The Vallejo mask stays where I put it.

 I got out my trusty Paasche Model H and preshaded the whole airframe with Mr. Color flat black. That single action airbrush is excellent for all but the finest lines, and it has only three parts to clean. Cleaning the Paasche H is even quicker and easier than cleaning a paintbrush, but you can get a beautiful paint job you'd never achieve with a paintbrush. Those are the two things I look for in a tool: better results and/or less trouble.

The important thing to remember about preshading is to airbrush very light coats over it and stop before you totally obscure it! I had a stock of Hataka paint I'd bought for various projects, and decided to use their Olive Drab (Late) and Neutral Gray. 

I'll have to take some more pictures of the finished model and post them later.

Italeri No. 6037, 1/72 scale Austrian & Russian General Staff

 My wife and I saw Ridley Scott's Napoleon just before it was pulled from the theaters. I had my doubts about it going in, having heard of obvious historical inaccuracies and Scott's attitude toward historians, which he stated as "Were you there, mate? No? Then STFU!" Perhaps Scott thinks he's valuing lived experience over book learning, or art over pedantry, but he's really valuing ignorance over knowledge. Even with his cavalier attitude, Scott would have been very short on material about Napoleon without the detective work of historians.

Anyway, seeing the movie made me want to know more about the Napoleonic Wars and to try my hand at painting Napoleonic figures, something new for me.

I started off by priming the whole set with Mr. Surfacer 500, then painting faces and hands with Vallejo flesh tones. The figures are molded in polypropylene, which takes paint rather poorly, so the primer coat was essential, and even that was easy to scratch off. Then I started painting uniforms on one of the two trees of figures, the Russians.

My knowledge of Napoleonic uniforms is close enough to zero to constitute complete ignorance, so I had to do some research. I found that except for the three general officers, the remainder are grenadiers, probably the Pavlovski grenadiers, who kept their miter hats after other Russian grenadier regiments had traded them in for shakos. I found images online, including color plates from the 19th century and beautifully painted figures in larger sizes, and at first what I saw was blue uniforms. This made sense to me, since the diagonal white straps crossing over blue-uniformed grenadiers' chests would form the Cross of St. Andrew, an official emblem of the Russian Empire. In fact, it's the ensign of the Russian navy both under the czars and since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But I also found green, and various shades between blue and green, and a description of the Napoleonic Russian uniform color as "bottle green." That description is very specific, and wouldn't be applied to any color you'd describe as blue. I think the source of the supposed blue color is similar to the notion that USAAF P-51s in the ETO were painted blue, namely fading of color images and faulty color reproduction. But I'd painted them all blue! What was I to do?

I decided that repainting three generals wasn't too much trouble, but that repainting 18 grenadiers was out of the question. Before this, my figure painting experience was modern figures, generally WWII troops in monochrome uniforms. I could practically paint an entire platoon in olive drab in the time it takes to paint one Pavlovski grenadier! (Yes, while painting these, I kept telling myself to just be patient. The more patient I was, the better I enjoyed painting them. But that didn't mean I wanted to start over!)

One modification I made, based on the review of this set at Plastic Soldier Review, was to shave the monogram of Czar Alexander from the saddle blankets and paint on a star of St. Andrew. All the painting was with various Vallejo colors, except for some shiny bits that I painted with my old stock of Model Master metallics. The turf on the bases is Woodland Scenics held down with some of their scenery cement, which I then thinned and let soak into the attached turf to help it hold together.

I have yet to paint the Austrians, so they'll be the subject of a future post. Meanwhile, these figures are for the time being on display at AAA Hobbies in Magnolia, NJ.

Carpenters' Hall

Carpenters' Hall at 320 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia is an important historic site, and among other claims to fame was the meeting place of the First Continental Congress in 1774. The first thing a modern-day visitor probably notices upon entering is a display case near the center of the hall, housing a 1/24 scale diorama showing the building under construction in 1770. The diorama was made at the Hagley Museum about 40 years ago, and as closely as possible its construction matches that of the real thing, with wooden framing held together with dowels and wooden shingles being laid on the rafters, cedar shingles, and copper flashing. Tiny clay bricks being unavailable, the masonry is made of sheets of plaster with silk-screened bricks separated by scribed mortar lines. Nice little touches include a workhorse-powered hoist, scaffolding, workmen wearing three cornered hats, a well with a hand pump, an outhouse, and even a dog chasing a cat.

Before I got started. South face. See the dog and the cat?

Just this past week, I had the opportunity to work on this diorama, because the Carpenters' Company is celebrating its tricentennial in 2024 and wanted its model restored for the occasion. I jumped at the chance to do this: I'd never worked on a museum display before, so it would be a valuable experience. Also, I wasn't totally unqualified, since I had refurbished plenty of models and dioramas before.

On a previous visit in December I had examined the display case and come up with a plan to disassemble it to permit access to all four sides of the diorama. The hall is normally closed on Mondays, but in the winter it is closed on Tuesdays as well, so the task was to get as much done as possible in two days. Disassembly (and reassembly) required two two-by-fours fastened to the top and four tall people lifting the top off the case by the ends of the two-by-fours. Arrangements were made for the four tall people (including me) to come on January 8 and 9. My plan was to get there by train, walking the remaining six blocks or so, limiting how much I could carry. The week before, I made up a list of needed tools and supplies and bought whatever I didn't already have, and the night before fit it all into two carrying cases.

I took along a power drill, drill bits and screwdriver bits, some lengths of scrap wood to screw to the top of the case for the two-by-fours to be attached to, and drywall screws. For the work on the model itself, I took Q-tips (not enough!), toothpicks, pipecleaners, pipettes, paintbrushes, two airbrushes (Paasche VL and H), an assortment of Vallejo paints, mediums, and flow improver, an air compressor and regulator, AK diorama paste, lightweight spackle, and matte scenery glue and static grass from Woodland Scenics. If this list sounds exhaustive, it isn't, because there were other odds and ends that I found room for, like packing tape and twine, and other things that slip my mind now.

Wiping dust from the scaffold.

The morning of January 8, I arrived at 7:45 and got to work readying the top for removal. Once the top was off and the plate glass removed, I got to work cleaning away the accumulated dust. The model was sealed up fairly well over the forty years, but extremely fine dust had made its way into the display case, coating the horizontal surfaces. The layer of dust was less than .001" thick, and I got much of it off with a long paintbrush, with which I could reach pretty far into the model, and a vacuum cleaner, which I used to draw the airborne dust away (as well as directly vacuuming the ground surface where it was safe to do so). However, I've noticed in cleaning models before that dust can really cling to painted surfaces, as if it's chemically bonded (maybe it is!), and some of the dust simply couldn't be removed. This was particularly the case on the window sills, so I repainted those. They were a warm white, a paint color that I matched by adding a tiny amount of yellow ochre. A chalky white paste had been smeared on various horizontal surfaces to represent spilled mortar (a trough for mixing the mortar is on the ground, next to a pile of sand for mixing with the lime). The white stuff came off easily, so I tried to clean around it. 

Adding a dark wash to the joints.

The scaffolding was represented by long twigs lashed together with string, which I took to represent long, narrow poplar trunks tied with rope. As I wiped away the dust with damp paper towels, it became evident that the scaffolding had a coat of grey paint. I couldn't tell how much of the grey was dust and how much was paint. I'm not sure why they painted it grey, except perhaps to represent weathered wood. Wiping off the dust took much of the paint off. This left streaks, and to me the resulting effect suggested poplar trunks that had been shorn of bark. so I left it that way. Some of the lashing around the joints was dark, making it more apparent how the scaffolding was constructed, so I added a wash of burnt umber to all the joints, wiping away the excess.

Greener greenery, and a wetter well. NE corner.

The groundwork of the diorama was a fairly uniform shade of brown, including the back dirt piles. My experience digging holes leads me to expect a brown top layer and lighter, reddish or yellowish subsoil, so part of my preparation for the job was to find out what the actual soil colors would have been, in order to represent them more accurately. For this, I enlisted the aid of an archaeologist I happen to be married to, Dr. Ilene Grossman-Bailey. She searched through a geographically-linked index of archaeology reports (which a mere civilian like me can't access), and found a 2022 report on excavations at Carpenters' Hall done by Richard Roy of AECOM. She asked a friend at AECOM for a copy, and within a day I had the answers I was looking for. I found a good paint match for most of the subsoil below the pre-1770 surface was Vallejo 70.921, "English Uniform," so this is the color I airbrushed them, adding a little white to add highlights in a second pass.

The bosses confer. North face.

Unfortunately, my airbrush started giving me trouble, so boy was I glad I'd brought a spare! I switched from my VL to my Model H for the rest of the groundwork and foliage, and fixed the VL the following weekend. The problem with the single-action H is there's no using it like a spray can like I would on a model, starting next to the model to avoid sputtering on it and sweeping across. Instead, I had to two-hand it to shoot air on the target before adjusting the paint flow. Fortunately, painting groundwork and foliage is forgiving. Speaking of foliage, the model builders at the Hagley museum had added grass in clumps. It looks like static grass, but as far as I know this product has only been around for about ten years, mainly used by model railroaders. The clumps looked a little sparse, and their color was none too healthy, so I squirted in some scenery cement and stabbed in clumps of static grass in places where the grass would be more lush, such as around the well. I brightened up the old foliage and made the old and new foliage match better by airbrushing with various shades of green, starting with a light yellow green then changing to darker tones. I also dabbed in some acrylic medium on the well platform under the spout, so it looks like the well has been used recently.

A wagonload of shingles. SW corner.

No modeling experience is without its lessons, which is one reason I undertook this job. Working under a deadline, it's really important to relax and do it right while sticking to a schedule. I tried to make the most of the two days, but in retrospect I think I rushed some things a little, like painting the groundwork, with the result that it didn't come out quite the color I intended. A literally painful lesson, which I got while carrying my heavy stuff back to Jefferson Station in a driving rainstorm after a long, tiring day, is to make sure my stuff is easy to transport. The carrying cases were just about ripping one arm out of the socket, then the other, while my umbrella kept getting turned inside out. Either a backpack or a wheeled suitcase would have made the walk a lot easier. Another lesson is to make sure to have adequate lighting. The hall has rather poor lighting, coming from two candelabras (plus a desk lamp I was able to cadge). This was okay on Monday, since the hall also has nice large windows. However, those windows have shutters, and not just for show. They are kept closed at night and in inclement weather, and the weather that Tuesday was some of the most inclement in a long time. As a result, I had a very hard time seeing what I was doing (another reason I had trouble getting the groundwork the color I wanted).

The most excuse-our-dustiest part of the diorama. SE corner.