Our friends at MIG Productions have added to their extensive line of pigments with five new additions to the mix. They are; P045 Faded Corsair Blue, P046 Old Aluminum, P047 Dark granit (sc), P048 Faded Green, and P049 Fresh Green. Each of the powders comes in the now familiar MIG style flip top plastic bottle containing 20 ml of product. A generous amount of pigment that most modelers should find will last through a good number of different projects.

I am guessing that most of us have by now used pigments in some form or another so it is doubtful that we will need too much of a run down on just how they work. If you haven’t tried any pigments; what are you waiting for, go out and get at least a couple and play around with them a bit, you’ll be happy you did. There are some effects that you will find are best created, and sometimes only possible, with the judicious application of pigments.

Review

The first thing I did was look for something to test these guys out on. Because of the corsair blue pigment I thought I would try some of them out on an airplane. Unfortunately, I don’t have a blue USN airplane setting on the shelf, so I went in a slightly different direction. Grabbing my trusty P-39 Airacobra I thought I would work with the two green shades. I started out with the Fresh Green which seemed a bit light in tone to me. You can check out the pictures to the left and make up your own mind. I taped off a panel on the starboard upper wing and added some in order to be able to see the contrast. The Faded Green is the pigment that was added furthest outboard of the same wing. To my eye the Fresh Green seemed like a better faded look than the Faded Green pigment did, but hey I wear corrective lenses so you can make up your own mind. At any rate, the pigments both handled well, easy to work with and no problem getting them to adhere. I haven’t used a fixer on any of these; I wanted to see how they would work out on their own. Some pigments have an almost oily feel to them and seem to grab and hold fingerprints, not these; I could gently handle the model without worry about prints.

The other three colors I thought I would try out on an old Alan kit of the BA-20 armored car I built many, many years ago that now has been relegated to painting test bed. The first pigment I applied was the P047 Dark Granit (Granite, I assume) to the side of the car, it worked well enough, perhaps the crummy winter whitewash wasn’t the best background but I think you can still see the subtle change that the pigment caused. Not bad when you consider that subtle is usually what you’re looking for with a pigment. You can see the next pigment, the P-45 Faded Corsair Blue, once again, it handled well and should look great on one of those Pacific Theatre Navy birds.

The last pigment was P-46 Old Aluminum. This one was a bit of a disappointment; it didn’t seem to do much at all. The powder inside has a strange tendency to ball up as the picture shows. The color seemed little more than a very light gray with some white mixed in. I tried it out on the Humber that I am slowly working on but I could not tell any difference, it made so little impression that photos simply appear to be two pictures of the same thing without having done anything. Perhaps in the right setting it can give an oxidized aluminum look to a model but I’m still a skeptic.

Conclusion

Well, four out of five is not bad. I love working with pigments and these will all find a place on my workbench. Now I have to find time to work on that Hellcat I’ve been telling myself I’ll get to soon!

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