Just some random ranting to start my day.
I knew it was going to be a dry year, but the ground is literally cracking, leaves are already falling off the trees, and I legitimately cannot remember when we had measurable rain (my birthday, maybe?) Ugh.
In other annoying news, I attempted to strip a Proud Arabian Stallion body I found loitering on my workbench. But whatever paint the original customizer slapped on him, it’s resistant to everything short of a blowtorch.
At this point it’s about 50/50 of whether I’m going to toss him in my free box, or keep him on the workbench because dammit I don’t want him to beat me. But I have no idea what I would turn him into, and far too many projects already cluttering up my life.
Anyway, I was sorting through a pile of ephemera I found while finishing up my saleslist, and and thought this box might be worth at least a quick discussion:
Many hobbyists make the blanket assumption that any obvious paint removal via acetone is an aftermarket alteration, but that’s not always the case. It was one of the many techniques used, especially in the Chicago Era (pre-1985) for Test Color experimentation.
This was the era prior to use of adhesive die-cut stickers, and creating a painting mask was a very labor-intensive process. Before going through the effort, they’d sometimes paint up models and then apply acetone – they used it to fuse model parts together, so they had gallons of it – to remove paint and alter markings and patterns until they finalized the design.
And as you can see on the box for the Action Stock Horse Foal, these Test Colors sometimes made it onto the box, often to the annoyance of many collectors And very occasionally out in the wild; the irregular star on my Test Color Phar Lap, on the Traditional Man o’ War mold, is very obviously acetone-retouched.
In case you were wondering, the opposite was also true, but somewhat less common: every once and a great while I’ll find a model that was touched-up at the factory with a hand brushed application of paint.
The few instances I’ve seen have all been with solid black paint, which makes sense: no need to worry about subtle gradations of color or blending, especially when the acetone-based paint itself dries in a matter of seconds!
It’s pretty remarkable they manage to get the effects they do, working with a finicky medium like that.
4 comments:
probably not the best thing to share.
plenty of people looking to make a buck.
as if cm gloss crap wasn't bad enough.
Ha! Nice title...
I bought a little palomino Rearing Stallion on ebay because he had such unusual stockings. It seems like his stockings were originally oversprayed, and someone had used acetone to give him stockings, and did a pretty good job. At first I was thinking 'Factory work!" because why would a collector modify an unusual model? (Although since then I've spotted a few Rearing Stallions with hardly any stockings on ebay, so it isn't rare.) I'm guessing it was a hobbyist though, since he also had a crummy layer of gloss. And naturally I scratched him while removing that stupid gloss. Not quite the same as a test color, but amusing.
I have a feeling the more knowledgeable con artists are aware of this technique. All the more argument for, buy it because it'll look good on your shelf, not because it might be rare.
Oh yes, this dry weather sucks. I'm in Western NY, and I feel like I have to water all the new plants every day. At least it's cooling off!
And I'd splurged and bought a copper rain chain. I just stare at it and try to imagine...
The acetone stars on my very early version of the CL QH Family drive me nuts. "NO, I didn't do that's it's original!" when I show them. The pink feet on the mare and foal are a dead giveaway, though. Wish the stallion had pink hooves, too.
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