To all who responded, many thanks. Day by day I am getting up to speed!
FS123> Check that there's not a thick sludge at the bottom, but yes, I strongly suspect you do have weathering paints which are intended to be wishy washy.
Thank you FS123 (if I may!). No sludge. The glass jars have what sounds like a small glass marble rolling around inside (brilliant!). I scraped the bottom of the container with a very thin sliver and detected no sludge. Rather like swinging the lead and checking the clay that adheres to navigate around The Grand Banks, I have read. As I write, I realize that that's what the plastic stems are for when I have snipped off the parts from the kits. Stir Sticks, and on the genuine plastic too!
Centenary> Panel Line colour isn’t a paint. It's also known as a 'wash.' The use of panel line colour is to highlight panel lines on models, usually tanks, planes or other models that are not black in colour. The idea is to 'wash' the area of the model with a loaded brush and then remove as much or as little as you want. When it dries, the main colours underneath show through but, where there's supposed to be a joining of metal panels, this is now highlighted and darker.
Thank you Centenary. So I chanced on the wrong paint to begin my little odyssey. Oh well, no harm done.
If I understand you, the wash would drop into the small gaps between panels, then when I wipe a cloth over the body, those gaps would retain the black wash and that would accentuate them to the eye.
Ironduke > Along with my paint collection, which mainly I use for throwing away when they dry up, I have spray cans of Tamiya flat black and flat white as well as a primer which I find very useful for many of the basic jobs (and they keep better).
Thanks for this tip, Ironduke. I refrained from ordering spray cans on the grounds that I should first try a simpler brush as in The Good Old Days, but I realize that spray cans of hobby paint weren’t visible to me as a 14-year old, so they did not form part of my hobby memory.
We are about to learn the rules of shipping aerosol cans through the mail, I guess :flee:
Bufferstop >
I use a stirrer made from a paper clip, poked through a card disk as a splash guard then held in the jaws of a mini-drill. Thirty seconds of stirring will usually restore a tinlet of paint which has separated into sludge and solvent. The main component of the sludge is French chalk which is added as a flatting agent. I hold the tin in the rubber covered jaws of the vice from my pillar drill rather than trying to hang on to the tin with one hand, whilst holding the drill in the other and somehow switching the darned thing on without letting go of either!
Thanks Bufferstop. On receipt of my 40 paints I stocked a small carton with them and ritually flip the carton over each morning on the grounds that even a mildly effective stirring is better than no stirring at all.
On top of that I have a collection of 4mm stir sticks that I bring home from the café (Second Use For Everything) which I shall use with the cans of “real paint”. Too they will give me a better idea of the true content of a can, perhaps a stock of paint chips for future use.
I have no vice (maybe some vices, but …) and no pillar drill. This is all-done-by-hand right now.
Mountain > … I use ordinary household exterior paint on my models when I have run out of certain colours because at least I know I have paint and I can get better value for my money as well.
BRILLIANT! (to coin a painting phrase)
Thanks for this tip. I am becoming known for my Second Use For Everything views; just this week I collected a half-full pint pot of egg-shell. Armed with this link
https://stationcolours.com/ I can take a test sample of all my cans of leftover paint and match the colour to a livery to discover what company I am modeling this week (cheeky grin).
Why didn’t *I* think of using regular paint. Another good experiment to try out on my eight starter kits.
I suppose too that one could use interior or even exterior house paints on buildings (gets excited …)
Cheers
Chris
