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Cheaper’s Guide to Modeling
You know, professional modelers would spend more than 50 dollars per month on supplies alone. If you are new to this hobby, you might not want to spend that much money on it. If so, this is the guide for you.
To start it off, let me introduce you to two concepts: hand brushing and airbrushing. Hand brushing is a technique for using hand brushes on modeling.
Hand brushes are easy to learn in terms of detailing and it is very cheap. However, hand brushes are hard to master when painting large surfaces due to the fact that they create brush strokes on the surface.
Air brushes, on the other hand, creates a very smooth surface and is easier to create a professional look to your models. However, the supplies are way more expensive than using paintbrushes.
For hand brushes, testors brushes are good enough for beginners. The package contains three brushes, two pointy and one long, and is sold approximately $1.50 US. Try to avoid buying the paint set by testors, as the enamel paint is really hard to control and it smell pretty bad, not to mention that it is more toxic than the paint I am going to tell you to use.
For paints I will usually buy the craft paints sold in art store, mainly because they are very cheap and they have a lot of color variety so you don’t have to mix it up yourself. A lot of people claims that using craft paint for modeling is not a good idea because it is too thick and it is bad quality. In terms of thickness, we can mix it with thinners that I will be talking about later and in terms of quality, let’s check this out: Tamiya’s quality paint is $3 US for 20ml and craft paint is $1 for 100ml and is thicker, that means you can make more paint out of it, so which is more cheaper?
For thinner, I’d say 80% thinner from your local store would do. So far I have use it with no problems at all. Note: do not use water to thin paints!
For airbrushes, if you are a beginner that does not want to spend a lot of money on airbrushes, I suggest a single action airbrush, which is only about $14 and it would do the things that a novice would want it to do; paint flat surfaces. The main expenditure for airbrushing is the air source.
Here are a couple of options:
Tires: Dirt Cheap, but dirty and inefficient, imagine yourself filling up this stuff every 30 seconds of airbrushing.
Airtank: Around $30 to $40, has a stable air flow, and lasts around half an hour, however, you have to fill it up at a gas station.
Air Compressor: $100 or above, it is by far the best choice, and you never need to refill, not to mention that it has a strong pressure for stable airbrushing. However, it is very expensive and you may not want to buy an air compressor just for modeling and it is very loud.
That concludes our cheaper’s guide to mecha modeling.