After building the Westfalia, I wanted to practice on a couple of models. When I was younger, I would build airplanes and generally not cars. I mostly followed the kits without deviating too much. I bought an airbrush near the end of the Westy, and I made some mistakes when I was using it to paint the roof. Mainly, I held the brush too far from the Westy so that the spray dried before it hit the surface. This created a strange texture on the surface, like sand-paper (but it was kind of cool – the longer I sprayed, the taller these weird structures on the surface grew). So the goal with the practice kits was to practice air-brushing, and tryout some techniques that I hadn’t tried before on some models that I didn’t really care about too much.
The intent was to pick up one cheap (~$30) kit off amazon of a Beetle and a model Porsche. I accidentally ordered 2 beetles, so even more practice!
The kit for the 2 bugs Is a pretty simple kit. It’s mainly intended to be click-together. Kind of a starter kit. It’s probably what I should have started with rather than the Westy, but whatevs.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0409-768x1024.jpeg)
I think this is a fairly old kit. It required a lot of clean-up of flash around the edges, and some of the lines, particularly around the windows weren’t great. Still, it was perfect for my purposes.
I used this Tamiya metallic blue lacquer paint for the base colour.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0410-edited.jpeg)
I started with a grey primer, and then used a flat black to provide some pre-shading. What I’ve heard is that the pre-shading is a bit transparent and gives a subtle shaded look. This is one of the experiments that I was trying on this kit. As you can see from the photo, I wasn’t kidding that Ineeded practice.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0413-edited.jpeg)
The shading was decided not subtle! This may be because I’m using a metallic colour (which my artist significant other advises are somewhat transparent). In any event, it took several coats before that black was more subtle than not.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0416-edited.jpeg)
It took several coats, with wet-sanding in between, but eventually that pre-shading actually became much more subtle, and I got an outstanding shine. All in, I’m pretty happy with how the paint-job turned out.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0421-edited-scaled.jpeg)
Once the paint had dried, I assembled and painted the details in silver by hand with a very fine brush. For a cheap practice model, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0430-edited-1.jpeg)
In addition to the practicec with the air brush and polishing the paint, I also tried a couple of experiments on getting a carpet texture on the floor. I used some sand/powder stuff that I found at Michaels and sprinkled it over some white wood-glue diluted a bit with water. At this scale, this gives a fairly believable carpet look.
![](https://secretspaceman.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_0431-edited.jpeg)
Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of the interior showing how the carpet looked. But all in all, it was a pretty successful practice run! Not bad for just a quick practice car.
There were a couple of places where I noted that I could have done things better. First, the sand-powder stuff (not sure the name), has a bit of a sparkly look, being sand. Next time round, I would have painted it. Also, the wet sanding the paint was a lot of work. I think I will try using a varnish going forward and sand that instead of the paint itself. The wet-sanding helped get the gloss, but it also took the paint down to the plastic in a couple of places.