Another modeler with the hubris to tell an entire community the point of modeling.
Painting completed models is not the point with me. I suspect others may have their own motivations as well. Relaxation? The desire to display something a relative used?
I’ve been to several museums that display unpainted models. It seems painting them wasn’t the point. Hell, I volunteer at one that has unpainted models, No one has ever complained.
I’ve also seen many different mahogany models in the Philippines, again, unpainted. They must not have seen the point either.
Architectural models? At my university - rarely painted.
Railroad modelers who scratch-build brass locomotives, and leave them unpainted? Or who buy them prebuilt. I guess they don’t see the “point” either.
I get the most satisfaction in the build, adding details the kit producers missed, or got wrong.
Busting out the airbrush or a spray can and doing a single color hardly requires skill on my part.
(oaky, for some people is apparently does) Even doing mutli-color - there are masks for aircraft and armor. Stick them on and spray. Is it “lazy” to use those? I’m not going to complain if I see the results at a contest. Probably because I don’t feel the need to compete.
Well, you answered that one yourself.
For me personally, it’s much harder to do a good job on a “microscopic” instrument panel or a dashboard than spraying camo. Isn’t it just lazy to use Kelik products when:
Imagine a world where everyone got to model their own way, without others with a limited world view trying to impose their own values upon others.
Time to drill for oil,
refine my own styrene,
measure museum pieces myself,
dig for iron ore, make molds
according to the measurements I made,
do my own injection molding,
forge my own knives and other tools,
search for pigments and make paints,
cook up ethyl acetate or acetone as “glue”,
hunt furry animals and make my own hairy brushes,
use foot operated bellows to get low pressure
compressed air for an airbrush.
OR
Buy a model at the level of completion my heart desires
At first I was one of those people asking what is the purpose of getting a pre-painted model? Isn’t the purpose of model making to assemble it and paint it yourself? For people that don’t have an airbrush or people that have physical impairments, this is great for them.
For me, personally, these pre-painted kits are a great idea especially seeing I don’t have the luxury of an inside paint booth that I can paint anytime I want. I for one can only paint outside in the late spring to early autumn. I can’t paint outside every day during that time frame because of the pollen in the spring. I live in the mountains in the middle of the woods. I also can’t paint every day in the summer because of the rain and humidity. It just rained here for the last three days and this summer, it has rained 3-4 days a week every week. I can’t paint in the winter because, again, I can only paint outside. I have tons of started kits sitting around waiting for paint because of the limitations I listed above.
I never had a pre-painted kit but one thing comes to mind though. The earlier pre-painted kits, all the parts were still on the sprues where you had to snip them off and assemble them but some of the pre-painted parts where you snipped them from would need touching up. You would still need to paint them anyway and trying to match the exact color the manufacturer used was not easy. I haven’t seen the contents of this Border pre-painted kit yet so I have no idea how it comes. So, that is one of the problems I see with pre-painted kits, trying to match the colors if they need touching up from the areas the parts were snipped from.
With all that said, while I am limited to painting, I still like painting the kit myself and seeing that I did that. As I am getting older and only have a very small window of opportunity to paint because of the weather limitations, these pre-painted kits are starting to look better and better for someone like me. If the price is competitive with the unpainted kits and won’t need touching up, then it is something I would be willing to try. If the prices are more expensive which I think would be being pre-painted, then I will stick to having a pile of unpainted kits in the stash until I can get to them.
Hmmm… Jesse James comes to mind. Mined his own ore. Studied with a blacksmith at a kibbutz in Israel. Pounds out his own tanks out of sheet metal. And yet, his CFL builds are all pretty much clones of one another, with different paint,
And with all that - he’s still an ass.
By the way, he did not paint his own bikes.
Nor did the folks at OCC. They had others do it for them.
I could see factory painting work for modern German stuff with rigid pattern books for camo where all of them are identical, but it struggles when the camo is field-applied and thus random. Still, as long as they sell enough to fund other projects…
And since the Leopard 2A7 is fairly modern, well… Yes, from what I can see, they’re all painted the same, just like ROK and US vehicles for the most part.
In fact, at one time ,German and US vehicles wore the same pattern, as best as it could be fitted to different vehicles.
Yep, the hobby has gone downhill since you had to carve your models from Mastodon ivory with your own teeth… The rot set in when aftermarket pre-shaped sharp flints became available for those who could not knap their own.
I have bought pre-painted snap-together kits, but only when cheap and I’ve always re-painted them, often without first stripping them. But that may change as my shaking hands get worse. I do have a Gunpla kit with different colours moulded on the same frame; it too was to have been given a re-paint but has been moved down the “to do” schedule as I might have to do it OOB.
It’s interesting that despite the ever-accelerating advances in technology, I remain true to my roots, in my hands even the latest and most refined figures end up looking like the Venus of Willendorf’s grandmother…
M
I have found that I cannot paint and decal the car for $20.
I don’t know if this price point extends to an armor kit but when I was 10 years old and building Auroras 1/48th WW1 aircraft this would have been amazing to have a painted option.
I built those old Aurora WWI aircraft as a kid as well. But I bult the last one before I was nine. I remember because we moved from Hawai’i before my ninth birthday. I wish I had some of those cool clear plastic bases…
Now here’s a related topic: Camo decals for uniforms. Should they be 'banned" from competition as well? I mean, it’s cheating, right? Or being lazy? Or maybe for the crowd who just can’t do it,
I’d post a recent example from this site but that would be mean. Suffice it to say, blobbing four colors on a helmet cover does not Woodland Pattern make.
Personally, I enjoy the challenge of painting camo. But if someone wants to use the decals, why should I care?
I don’t know where the line is for the purity of model building, but it seems there is help available to improve your finished model kit depending on your skill level.
It just seems like pre-painted is just another way to improve the final presentation if you haven’t the skill or equipment.
I have an F18 in the stash and I haven’t built it yet because I am uneasy about painting it.
The grime/fade covers every square foot of the aircraft. The grime /fade is suttel. Pre-shading will be required followed by post shading. This would be so easy to overdo and have to do over that I haven’t started yet. A wrap around decal of this paint scheme would be appealing to me.
So there are two schools of thought: the modelmaking purists who prefer the fewer aids the better, and the pragmatists who welcome most labour-saving assistance.
I have a contradictory foot in both camps, but I also occupy a third position. Namely, if the final result however it was achieved looks realistic (especially if it looks better than anything I could have done), then I don’t give a crap how it was achieved. It’s a great model, period.
Yeah, I’m there to. If it is an improvement over what I can do I will go for it. I don’t think a prepainted hull or fuselage would work for me. I want to get the seam work right and that would just screw up the paint. other than that, I am game. In some ways this discussion is like the interior or no interior preference.
I think we all apricate someone who scratch builds parts for their kit, but I don’t hear grumbles for those that buy and add accessories instead of scratching them. I think most people are just trying to get their kit to the next level.
If most of us here are honest with ourselves our abilities diminish with age. Our sight and our dexterity are declining. I am building Riich’s 200th scale Gato, the Deck gun has at least 15 parts. two have been launched into the void because my grip on the tweezers slipped. It would have been no problem in the past. but this is now, not the past. Any aid that helps I am for.
Yep that’s another aspect, what each of us can or cannot do anymore. That’s at the golden-age-year end of the spectrum. Some were speculating that kids might be hooked by entry-level pre-painted stuff & hopefully graduate to what we’ve all been doing. Except the price point may not be sympathetic to that idea for many.
Whatever, until there’s an HMS Victory kit with eezy-rigging I don’t think it’s the apocalyptic end of real modelmaking as we know it.
This is just my personal opinion. Painting camo on a 1/35 vehicle is different than painting camo on a figure especially a 1/35 figure which is much smaller than a vehicle. I use the 1/35 camo decals for uniforms as I have zero figure camo painting skills. Masking a vehicle with putty is much easier than trying to paint the camo patterns on a figure as the camo patterns are much smaller on the figure. Painting the woodland BDU wouldn’t be too bad on a figure but the OCP and MARPAT patterns are much harder to do in 1/35. The digi camo patterns on a vehicle and figure are also extremely time consuming and again, with the very small window of opportunity I have to paint outside because of the weather limitations I spoke about previously, I avoid digi camo patterns on vehicles because I don’t want to spend a month masking the kit. With the weather limitations I endure, I can still barely get even one kit painted in overall sand. While most of the limitations are weather related, I also have limited time to build and or paint as I also have to take care of my elderly parents which also take up a good amount of time. I have to do everything for them as my father is blind and both parents are in their mid 80’s. I have to do the banking, credit card, grocery orders and pickups, take them to their doctors, pickup pharmacy medications, mail, sometimes cook, do the garbage and cleaning. Besides taking care of them, I also have to take care of their dog, feed it, walk it, bath it and take it to the vet. So, pre-painted kits and camo decals for figures are looking better and better every day for me.
I used the CrossDelta camo decals on these 1/35 figures. Even though I used the camo decals for the uniform and helemt, I still had to hand paint a good amount of parts to finish it. Everyone can call it cheating all they want but I don’t enter shows/contests. I build for myself only.
