Interesting reading
Whilst I was sat reading May’s edition of MMI I read an article on the Iran-Iraq war and the AFV club M38-A1. This was made and painted by Emilien Pepin, I was intrigued with the hairspray job that he did on the vehicle’s paintwork; I thought would it be possible to use this procedure on the door of this build. I’m not that much of a vehicle or armour modeller, so I thought I’d try it on a building instead.
With the door bone dry I sprayed over it with a couple of coats of Insette hairspray, (what a plonker I felt going into my local village shop and asking for hairspray this didn‘t do my street cred any good). I noticed that it didn’t give a shine at all so I gave it three more coats, this was left to dry for a few minutes (15 to be exact). Then it’s a quick coat of V118 Middle Stone, spraying on with hardly any air pressure – again three even coats and left for a few minutes. After this, I got an old dry brush that has had some hammer and the bristles are starting to splay out and curl, so with some warmish water in a bowl I soaked the brush. I started to remove the paint that I had sprayed on, the hairspray had reacted a little with the paint, it had gone like the paint had been out in all weathers, and in direct sunlight, it had started to crack and blister, so this was left and the other was removed. It went down to the black primer in places, and not in others, this wasn’t a problem I just didn’t rub as hard, on the other panels. I then thought ‘what if I sprayed another colour over the top of the other colour that I’ve just taken off?’ this worked out well, it was given a light but even dusting of V141 English Uniform, I then started to wash off this colour with a little more care this time, it worked perfectly, as you can see from the results. This is one technique that I will use on a vehicle in the future, thanks Emilien.
The rest of the paint work was applied with dry brushing to bring the rustic look to the base; the pavement was dry brushed with V157 Dark Sea Grey and 169 Black going over with V157 and V158 Medium Sea Grey, the final highlight is to be added after the detritus has been added and painted to blend in all of the colours.
Although the building is not damaged in the cross section that you can see judging by the rubble the upper storey has probably suffered some battle damage, from the sustained artillery attack that the town suffered in June 1944. This is portrayed by the odd roof tile and bricks lying on the ground in front of the building. A lot of the brick work and rubble was either painted or stained with the paint before it was attached to the base. This saves a lot of time later trying to paint into small in accessible places and quite often annoying little places.
