What's your favourite enamel brand to airbrush?

Don Stauffer

Was talking to a buddy yesterday.  He had met with a few modeling friends the day before, and they were riding him for being so old-fashioned and not going to acrylics exclusively, like they did (he does use acrylics, at times, but also uses enamels a lot).

We compiled a list of what we like about Testors enamels;

Easy to find (even at Michaels for the regular, non-model master line), with good selection of colors

Easy to thin

We can brush small parts with good coverage.

i see no point in switching over to acrylics since he is comfortable with enamels. like i always say "if your comfortable with it, stay with it." 

i only use MM enamels and tamiya acrylics and i always here about all these other brands being better,AB better,and more accurate. and switching isn't cheap either since you have to buy the whole line up. 

i guess you can say everyone is old school at our LHS since everyone uses MM enamels. nothing wrong with that. 

Have you had any experience in using Badger marine colors?

Thank you STJ. I do wish that one of the two surviving LHS would carry WEM paints. Model Master is gonna issue some new naval colors, but based on my experiences with their previous Acryl Marine colors I am a bit leery. I  just prefer to get my paints locally at a shop where I can zip over and buy replacements when I run low/out rather than online ordering. And I do prefer enamels over acrylics in most cases.

One more recent build using another currently available enamel paint line for the main finish- Xtracolour enamels. They have a unique system. All of their exterior camouflage finish colors are gloss. Those paints take longer to dry and cure, but after that is done, you just apply your decals and any washes, followed by your flat, satin, or semi gloss top coat to seal it all in. The have huge selection of paints from various countries' air arms from WWI to current, and also including airline colors, much like Humbrol used to have.

I really like th WEM enamels !!

StikPusher those are awesome planes BTW!!

Was talking to a buddy yesterday.  He had met with a few modeling friends the day before, and they were riding him for being so old-fashioned and not going to acrylics exclusively, like they did (he does use acrylics, at times, but also uses enamels a lot).

We compiled a list of what we like about Testors enamels;

Easy to find (even at Michaels for the regular, non-model master line), with good selection of colors

Easy to thin

We can brush small parts with good coverage.

When I use enamels I use Revell and Humbrol. I prefer Humbrol, very easy to use, thins nicely with either white spirit or generic laquer thinner.

WutDaFunk

Has nobody used Rustoleum? I heard it's pretty cheap and durable.

Actually I have used that once - I was just doing a quick no frills 1/72 Sherman for fun and had a random can of Rustoleum dark green paint that looked about right, so I used that.  The finish was actually really good in my opinion.  I guess the main problem is the lack of colour variety.

Great looking models stikpusher.  Glad that you get good results using the Humbrol's.

Only their primer ;-)

Has nobody used Rustoleum? I heard it's pretty cheap and durable.

I have not tried WEM, but I also do like XtraColours. With those you could skip the gloss coat before decals as almost the entire paint line is gloss.

Modelmaster and WEM Enamels

Oh I could give you a parade of pics of  Humbrol and Model Master finishes on my builds...

I'll leave you with these...

Model Master

Humbrol

and a mix of both

Tamyia and Model Master Poly S when I can find it it's getting rare.       ACESES5

model master enamels. easy to find and they have every color of the rainbow. WW2 all the way to FS codes.

I'll ditto Texgunner - I'm slowly switching to acrylics, but I have had great luck with both Humbrol and ModelMaster enamels.

I airbrush Humbrol and MM enamels.  I haven't noticed too much difference between the two to be honest.

Gary