I am very appreciative of Acrylicos Vallejo (AV) for sending new products for review, and I am equally appreciative of all the Review Corps crew members who take care of all of the legwork to get materials to reviewers and the completed reviews published for the modeling community. It is a privilege to be part of this manufacturer-modeler group effort.
We live in a Golden Age of modeling, we do. It seems that not a day goes by before some new product is offered to plastic modelers. This time around is a new set of excellent diorama weathering effects offered by Vallejo called ‘Thick Mud’. As the name suggests, each of six varieties offered contains a different shaded sludge mixture that looks, acts, and cleans up like mud.
This is the stuff that we have all tried to perfect: using water, paint, pigments, real dirt, fine sand and some kind of fixing agent. Vallejo has simply taken the guesswork out of it for you, but they’ve smartly rendered the concoction in an easy-to-use-and-clean-up acrylic medium.
The set includes the following shades:
Originally envisioned as a movie by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, The Frozen Chosen has been released as a book about the First Marine Division and the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. This new book relies heavily on a series of interviews conducted by Cleaver with survivors of the battle resulting from a 1989 reunion of “The Frozen Chosen”. The release online by the US Marine Corps Historical division of the Korean War Project, along with recently released from Korea, Russia, and China finally spurred Thomas McKelvey Cleaver to finish this book.
The book is divided into 10 chapters with an introduction, index, a Bibliography and Glossary of Abbreviations:
Model Art Modeling Magazine is an excellent periodical from Japan providing an abundance of modeling subjects in each issue. It doesn’t matter what your modeling focus is, each issue will provide something of interest for you, and more than likely, you’ll find something interesting that you didn’t know you would.
Although the magazine is published entirely in Japanese, the quality of the photos in each issue is really amazing, and goes a long way in telling the story. There are plenty of “work in progress” and “how it was built” photos highlighting the tools, materials, and techniques used by the master builders. These photo guides go a long way in explaining the builds visually, although I’m sure some details are missed without a proper translation. In fact, the photography is so good, even the advertisements were interesting. I found myself perusing the advertisements almost as much as the work in progress photos.
This is the forty sixth volume in the Weapon series. This volume deals solely with the 45 cal. M3 sub machine gun, which was commonly called “The Grease Gun” because of its resemblance to the mechanics grease gun familiar to so many young men in the army. It has also been called Americas Sten Gun because like its British counterpart it was designed to be made with stamped metal welded together. This simple design made it really cheap to manufacture with a net cost of $33.33 to the government. It is hard to believe that this weapon was used by the military for almost 50 years.
This 80 page paperback book is full of pictures and illustrations. Both B&W and color. There is a picture or image on practically every page. The full color illustrations are in the fine detail that the Osprey books are known for. The five chapters cover the development, use and impact of the M3 “Grease Gun”. There is an extensive bibliography for additional resources for research.
During its heyday the Roman Empire sprawled across the better part of three continents, making it one of the greatest political bodies of its day. To maintain such an empire required an enormous military budget and huge numbers of men at arms (an approach to militarism we can, alas, observe to this day). One of the chief duties of this sprawling military was to hold the edges of this empire from incursion from without.
Osprey Publishing and author Raffaele D-Amato have put together a surprisingly exhausting study of the military units comprising Rome’s Western borders – more specifically, what would someday become England, Germany and France.
Thank you to author James Lyman, and to Hill Country Hobby for the sample book. Thank you to the IPMS Reviewer Corps for allowing me to review a new independent, self-published book that will be a great resource for many modelers at all skill levels.
This excellent compendium of methods and techniques is produced and published using an independent (indie) publishing house, Create Space, an Amazon Company. I was unable to verify how the book is produced, but Create Space publications are often printed and bound on demand. Wholesalers often receive significant discount on bulk purchases. Modeling clubs, chapters and hobby shops may be able to take advantage of this format and discounts.
The best way to start this model is to clip all the parts and mark them with the call out number as not all the columns are the same. Some are taller and others are shaped differently. Then clean up all the molding lines and paint these parts. The painting is problematic as they call out some colors like Marble and ask you to mix the following colors Flat Skin Tone Warm, Flat light flesh and flat white. There are no percentages and then to top it off they say the Pentelic marble is an impeccable white with uniform, weak yellow coloration along with a photo of what the real marble looks like. I just painted the base a general white with a subdued dark wash to show the seams and slight textured surface of the base.
It’s that time of year again. That time of year to think about purchasing your 2017 Cross & Cockade International Calendar. “But”, you say, “it is only June of 2016! What’s the hurry?”
Well, first, you should realize that there may just be a limit to the print run for these calendars. I honestly don’t know if there is such a limit, but if there were you’d rather be on the “I got mine” side of that line.
Secondly, “the profits from the sale of the 2017 Cross and Cockade International Calendar are once again going to assist in the upkeep of the British Air Services Memorial at the St-Omer airfield in northern France” according to Roger Tisdale of Cross & Cockade. There is always a need for support for this fund, so why wait until closer to the New Year to provide some financial support to this very worthy cause? One can check out the St-Omer Memorial at http://www.webmatters.net/txtpat/?id=258
