I LOVE modeling. I bought my first model only a couple years ago at.....mmmm, probably age 11. A local modeling story was going out of business, and they had a major sale. I'm starting to wish I had bought more models. ![Sign - Oops [#oops]](/emoticons/icon_smile_sign_oops.gif)
Anyway, I bought a 1/72 scale german AA tank. Forgot the name. It was my first one, so I was very inexperienced. I built it in no time. I was proud of it. Looked pretty darn good for only having a hobby knife and glue. Heck, don't even think it was a hobby knife. lol. It sat in the box for a long time, while I looked for the right paint brushes and paints. Couldn't buy much at the time, (small allowance, rofl). After a year, I got back into modeling. Still hadn't painted the AA tank. I bought a Japanese T-61 Self-Defense force tank, and built it. I was very proud of my work, but I still haven't painted it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow, only if it's not windy. Parents won't let me airbrush in the house, (kind of a good thing), and still haven't been able to convince my mom to let me use the garage.
Then for another whole year, I hadn't continued my interest in modeling. Then, my dad told me about a game he's played as a kid. It was a 3D airplane combat game using 1/72 scale airplanes attached to clips made from closeline clips and some copper tubing. Then the clip was attached to two 3ft dowels that were insterted in a rolling stand. The stand had a wheel that could turn at different degrees. You could roll the plane, angle them up and down, move them on the dowels, move the stand according to what degree of turn you wanted your plane to make. It sounded awesome. He'd played it as a kid when a couple of his friends invited him to play it with them. He only played twice. One guy who owned a gaming and modeling store had made the game. All the stats of the different planes in all different era's and everything. He remembered the name of the guy's store, but said the guy had gone out of business. I found the game so interesting, I went online and found out the guy had moved his business to another state and changed the name. So, we bought the rulebook and a couple of stands. Now we're playing it all the time and have a ball. That's what caused me to become obsessed with modeling.
We needed to make the plane models for the game, so we bought a couple planes from our local hobby store, and some better tools like nice paintbrushes, a good hobby knife and a couple other things. I made some really good looking models. The very first model I ever completely finished was a 1/72 scale Revell Focke Wulf Fw-190 R-11. (the german AA tank and the T-61 were never completely finished, still hadn't painted them.) But the Focke Wulf could have been better. I painted it and quite a few other models with paintbrushes. It's hard to make camoflaugh look normal on small models using brushes. But I gained more experience with them and made my later models such as a JU-88 and a P-51B look good. But then I made a P-47D using a Model Masters mettallic steel colored paint. The paint seems to have different chemicals in the paint that separate quickly or something, because there are several different shades within the paint. This extremely brought out the lines made by using paintbrushes, so the model didn't look its best. I was so dedicated to making it look good, so I went on eBay and bought a Badger 360-1 airbrush. I've only used it once, testing out using the metallic paint on the wing of a 1/32 scale P-38L I bought. It looks awesome! So, I've just got to wait until there's no wind so I can airbrush my T-61. I can't wait!