Tamiya Navy Blue Paint

In the course of working on my new and updated Green Angels X-Wing squadron, I've finally tried Tamiya paints. In this particular case, their Navy Blue spray paint.

I'm a huge fan! 

Sprayed over a glossy black coat of paint.

The USS Midway's F4U Corsair & myself in 2011.

It might be a little hard to tell in the photo, but the color is absolutely perfect. It looks exactly like the F4U Corsair I've seen aboard the USS Midway in San Diego, California. I definitely made the right call in trying this spray paint out.

The paint was sprayed over a coat of Testors Glossy Black that had been lightly drybrushed with heavily thinned GW Eshin Grey (and a bit of Vallejo Gloss Varnish too). It needs detailing now, of course, but I think this is a great starting point.

This stuff is seriously fantastic!

I'm eager to try out some of Tamiya's other colors now! I'm impressed with the number of aircraft-specific paint they have, which has my creative mind working overtime. 

Civil War Medical Diorama: Prologue

After a meeting at the Lee-Fendall House the other day, I'm pleased to report that this Civil War diorama project is now officially underway! The figures were ordered that afternoon, but as they're all coming from the UK it's going to be some time until they arrive.

So in the meantime, I visited the local game shop to pick up supplies. There are so few of these stores in the DC area, and I just happened to luck out moving so close to one. And a rather good one at that! As you can see in the photo below, I stocked up on Vallejo paints and new brushes for the project.

In case you were wondering, this is what $280 worth of paint, brushes, and other supplies look like.

I've started work on some test figures and am pretty happy with the results so far. Expect photos of these lads when they're completed.

Spray Primer PSA

Fellow modelers...please consider this a sort of public service announcement.

If you're tired of paying $15 for GW's brand of spray primer, I stumbled across an insanely cheap solution while visiting my nearby Home Depot. How cheap are we talking? About $0.97 per can of Quick Color. That's how cheap.

And since I left my primer in California on accident, I decided to stock up...

I tried it out on a figure and found that it worked really well. The only thing is that you have to press on the nozzle a bit harder than you do on the GW stuff....but for less than a dollar per can it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.