Oil Paints: The agony and the ecstasy.

Artistic oils are most excellent for painting plastic as wood. I've done laminated wood with them (WWI planes), old wood and oiled wood (sailing ships), red wood and bark (decorations and diaramas) of any shade existing and plenty non-existing. Most excellent; I'm a loosy painter, but I was awfully impressed with my results. I will not exchange my oils for anything in the world. :)

The price of the very best quality tube of artistic oils here is under $10, I've bought 6 tubes, and that gives me any shade of wood I can think about plus white and black for washes and shades. water-soluble "oils" simply doesn't work this way. There is two ways for me to thin oils - with pinen and with some seed oil - first one make oils "rougher" a bit and cures in 3-4 days, second one makes them very soft, but after that they cure for weeks.

I can see why you would not use oils on aircraft. I havent assembled an airplane in over 10 years... However, I only get to do maybe 6 hours of model work in a week. So, its easy for me to put a model painted with oils away for a week to dry.

I have a couple of the water soluable oils and they didn't impress me. Let me know how they work out for you. maybe I'm doin somethin wrong.

SST

Oils are expensive, but as you noted they last a long time.  I have a few tubes of Winsor Newton that are at least 10 years old & still work as well as new.  Can't beat them for blending, but the drying time can be frustrating.  I've been experimenting with some of the new, so called, water soluble oils.  I think they are actually acrylics with some retarder agent added to make them slower drying.  They seem to blend as well as traditional oils & dry somewhat faster.  But they aren't inexpensive either.

Regards,  Rick