Hobbying In Place #10 Building the Airfix Handley Page Victor K2/SR.2

Blobs, Putty and Reality

I always think after all the building that painting will be easy. It only takes a moment after the first airbrush blast for reality to sink in like the cold hard kiss of a knuckle sandwich. So here is the big dumb plane, white on the bottom (self: easy), gray and green blobs on the top (self: easy). I decided to try out Mission Models paint after hearing how wonderful it is. In the pre-pandemic times I had purchased green, gray, white and thinner from one of the few surviving hobby stores in the area. The bottom was prepped with GSI Creos "Mr. Surfacer". Pure white is too glaring, the underside would be "Light Gull Grey". Several layers were sprayed on, but it still looked exactly like the primer underneath. I needed a pure white now, but everything was closed. I called the nice people at Chicagoland Hobbies and purchased a bottle of "MMP-001 White" and payed for it using a credit card. I rode my bike the mile or so to pick it up. Another fellow was already at the curb picking up much needed rolling stock. I got my own little bag of "MMP-001 White" and was on my way. This did not feel odd at all. Eventually, the white got onto the model and all in the right spots.

Now it was time to paint on those big English Blobs. I like blobs, although the English ones don't compare the the "Dating Game" style on Mi-24's. I tried two classic approaches to masking, tape and silly putty. Neither of these were cutting the mustard. To be fair, I had already set myself up thinking this was the fast/easy part, so disappointment was easily achievable.

Here is where I ended up. A cereal bag was cut into sections and the sections where then used to draw the blobs relative to the specific areas on the model. These where trimmed and then used to make paper templates. This somehow seemed like less work than masking everything. One thing it did solve was the masking pulling up paint.

Using this method I worked my way around the aircraft. It got bigger the more I worked on it. I was knocking into the lamp. I bought a bigger airbrush.

There are always distractions in between the painting of various blobs. I pulled these out to imagine how much more fun they would be if I was working on them instead.

The new normal (as opposed to the old abnormal?) are Zoom Hobby Club meetings. When we had face to face meetings the weird perspectives were produced by lack of sleep, now they are supplied by the users choice of camera perspective. You can see the fun here.

I use oil washes typically, on this model it didn't work how I wanted. I decided to try out a poor modelers "Flory weathering wash" by mixing pigments and water. Be sure to add a touch of dish soap to get the stuff to flow. Real aircraft will have white pane lines, this was a chance to try this out using light gray pigments. It seemed to work well. One big advantage is that the pigment is easily controlled unlike oil pigments. And if you really don't like it, it can be purged altogether. 

 I sold this ITC 1960 Giraffe on Ebay for $8 about an hour after listing it. I assembled these "actual reality glasses" printed on the back of Reese's Puffs cereal box. On the sides it says: "CAUTION: I'M IN ACTUAL REALITY". Clearly.

Bill (you know Bill, right?) used this on his MAT Arrow and showed it during one of our Hobby Club Zoom meetings. I had already pretty much finished painting my blobs. Curse his timing. I got some anyway, thinking that it would be useful in the future. It's called Tamiya Masking Tape For Curves and comes in various thicknesses. It's more or less electrical tape, but less sticky. The thinner the tape the tighter it will bend around a curve. This is great stuff, highly recommended.

So what did we learn? The music to Alias Grace is great background to build models. The scheme I picked for this aircraft led me to watching documentary's about the Falklands. I'm putting the last decals on now (well not right now, I'm typing this) and mostly promise that the model and horror of my writing will be complete in the next post.

That's it for now. Keep building in an uncertain world.