Acryl II

I'm not normally a big fan of acrylic paint. I've never had any success airbrushing the stuff, and when it comes to brush-painting, I approach the substance with extreme caution. Even the apparent gold standard of acrylic paint, Tamiya, comes off a distant second place in terms of handbrushing performance compared to, say, an egg wash. The stuff is awful, just awful, and I fail to understand at this point why anyone bothers with it.

Well, I'm not above experimenting, and my dissatisfaction with Tamiya's brush-painting performance led me to buy a few experimental jars of Model Master Acryl II acrylic paint. Now, I'm not even going to try to airbrush with the stuff - I've finally figured out how to airbrush Model Master and Humbrol enamels, and I'm just not going to unlearn how to do that. But I do have intentions of handbrushing with the stuff, and I've actually made a few token attempts already on an Academy PV-1 Ventura. No pictures of the model will be presented as its decals underwent a horrid transformation overnight and folded up like tacos, and I don't need this model seeing the light of day. But as a test bed for acrylic paint, it did pretty well.

I have to say, these Model Master acrylics brush-paint many times better than the Tamiya paints, and that's groovy. Even the semi-gloss white brushed pretty well, requiring only two coats to get good coverage over a dark sea blue background. I sprayed the propellers a nice yellow color called Marigold, then used acrylic silver and black on the hubs and blades. Result? Good coverage, quick drying, and none of that Tamiya pudding-skin effect.

It's good! But it's also very early.