There is somewhat of a recent trend in home furnishing circles that gives renewed life to older furniture and kitchen cabinets. The painting technique of which I speak is dry brushing. The trend has even caught the eye of Bob Vila, once and former host of the PBS series 'This Old House'. Bob is no longer affiliated with the program after lambasting (allegedly) a homeowner for being a lazy twit, but that's a story for another time.

This dry brush technique involves dousing your paint brush into the paint of choice, removing almost all of it from the paint brush bristles and applying the minute amount of remaining paint onto the selected object. In the case of a home improvement project that might be cabinet doors or the odd tabletop but for our purposes this missive will focus solely on scale models.

This technique highlights the raised aspects of whatever surface you apply the paint to, giving the object added depth. I suspect that many of you may already be familiar with this technique and have been for years. For those that are 'new to the game'' of scale modeling there any number of YouTube videos that go into detail about this finishing technique. I have included a link to the one produced by our sponsor, AMMO/ Mig Jimenez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMdIeUGfPiQ

Although you may already be well on your way to mastering this finishing technique what you may have overlooked is that AMMO/Mig Jimenez have come out with a line of DIO Dry Brush paints. Currently AMMO/Mig Jimenez has twenty-seven shades of DIO Dry Brush paint for your modeling pleasure. The shades range from white and grays to several metal finishes as well as sand, yellow, flesh and brick, among others. These paints are formulated a bit differently and are way thicker than normal run-of-the-mill model paints. (Thicker than normal means that these paints have the consistency of, say, ketchup or hand cream.) The thickness of this dry brush paint is thought to allow for better control of the dry brush technique and may allow for less waste of paint when initially applying the paint to your brush. I can testify to the fact that both proved to be true, in my case

I have included two examples (aircraft) that I utilized this DIO Dry Brush paint on and the process was painless and pretty carefree. In the case of the Kingfisher, using this dry brush paint eliminated the need to actually paint the canopy framing. This stuff is my new best friend, paint wise that is....

My thanks to AMMO/Mig Jimenez and IPMS/USA for the review sample.

P.S. If you get the Carly Simon reference give yourself an extra point.

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