These are the most amazing paint jobs I have seen at this scale. . .Would Peter be up for painting planes for me?
Bob - private message me Peter's email and I'll figure out what went wrong with his registration.
Mark
Well, get his access straightened out and you can ask him yourself.
I sent you a private message on that issue.
As to painting up some planes for you - I don't know, but I kind of doubt it. You'd have to ask Peter yourself if he's interested. My guess is probably not. He's got some things going on in his life right now that probably will limit his free time for the near future. He comes over one or two nights a week to paint - that's about all the time he can or wants to put into it. Also, all of the stuff we use - the paint, brushes, decals, etc. are mine. He doesn't have any materials so he can't paint them if he's home with nothing to do. He'd have to come over to my house to use my stuff, and if he's going to do that we still have over a hundred aircraft to go, then there's the armor, the ships, etc. still to paint. I estimate at the rate we're going that it would take at least another year or so to get everything in the game painted.
If he (or we) did decide to do some "paint for hire" I'll be blunt - it likely would not be cheap.
Right now we average about 1 plane for every 60 minutes of work. That takes into account the initial clean up and preparation, the actual painting, drying time between applications, and detail work (it doesn't include the priming, lacquering, or researching color photos or plates of the aircraft you're working on). Some go quicker, some go longer - this depends both on just how detailed we're going to be and also on the quality of the miniature itself. The last two nights I've been working on 6 Fw-190s and an He 111. They are each almost ready to lacquer - 2 of the 190's need a couple more details and the 111 hasn't been decaled yet. My point is that's seven aircraft ALMOST ready to be finished off - and it's taken roughly 8 hours of work time to get to that point. Again, slightly less than one plane per hour.
Then there's the cost of the materials. Not just the paint, primer, brushes, etc., but also the decals. The sheets we use from Dom's Decals aren't that expensive individually but when you use as many of them as we are it adds up. We are also using a lot of decal sheets from other scales from a local hobby shop to enhance the detail, and these are rather expensive. The swastikas on the tails of some of the German aircraft I did, for example, are kill marks from a decal sheet for 1:72 scale P-47s and P-51s.
I think you would find that if you set your mind to it you could probably do some that would be every bit as good as the ones we've done. Before we got started on this my miniatures painting experience consisted of painting about half a dozen each Flames of War vehicles and 1/2400 naval miniatures. Peter had never painted any, though he spent a lot of time building models as a kid. Neither one of us were what you would call experienced when we started on this. The trick is to be patient when you're working and start with something basic. For me, it was the B-25's. They were a good mold with no problems, and the paint schemes I chose were very basic. After painting those I did some Zeros, and gradually started doing more complicated schemes as I became more confident. Try painting a few and I think you'd find that you'd be better at it than you think.
At any rate, you’ve got his e-mail. Drop him a line and see what he says.
