A MODELMAKER’S LIFE: A DAY SPENT TESTING SMS RANGE OF AIRBRUSH-READY LACQUER PAINTS

17th November 2025

I mentioned a few days again that I’d be given some SMS paints to try, so today as I waited for the the Airfix Spitfire’s airframe to fully set, I decided to give them a go.

Albion Alloys had been kind enough to give me a full set of German colours, one set for the upcoming Airfix 109 project and a few more that I could use for some armour. It was the latter that I played with today.

In February I bought the Das Werk Panther, a model that I built not longer after. If you’ve followed this page regularly this year, you will have seen it sat on my desk, so I thought after 9 months, I should actually paint the thing!

Having basecoated the model with a layer of Mr. Surfacer Mahogany Brown, I set about airbrushing on an initial coat of Dark Yellow, before applying the dark red and green camouflage.

First things first: this paint is incredibly thin, so doesn’t need thinning. What it does need is an airbrush powered with very low pressure. Though the regulator showed a psi of 20, I’d cranked the MAC valve to almost closed, so the psi I used was around 10. With a 0.2mm nozzle and needle in the brush, I could spray lines of less than 1mm with ease, perfect when it came to edging those disruptive camouflage patterns.

The paint sprays like a dream. Layers can be built up easily to create super smooth, opaque colours that intensify with each individual pass. But it’s the way that you can freehand that’s the real plus with these paints. Straight from the bottle, incredibly sharp edges can be achieved, that thin paint and low pressure working in perfect harmony. What this means in action is that I now feel happy with the possibility of returning to freehanding camouflage on my aircraft models. This is something I abandoned ten years ago when I simply couldn’t get the edges to be as sharp as I wanted them to be without additional masking.

As it stands I have a painted model that allowed me to test all three colours, their application and other aspects such as smoothness of finish and drying times. All three criteria are important with any paint I use, so it was reassuring that the paint was very easy to use, created very smooth surfaces (even after building up multiple layers) and dried in seconds, at least to the touch (I didn’t apply washes and the like over anything, electing instead to let everything dry overnight).

Today has been a really worthwhile day at the bench because I now feel happy to use these paints on important projects for work. I won’t be swapping wholesale, but they will no doubt form an important part of my toolkit going forward. Indeed, the 1/24 Airfix Me109 will be finished using the paints supplied by Albion and I would not be considering that if I was not 100% happy that the results would be exactly what I need them to be.

See you tomorrow.