samedi 4 février 2017

Playmobil color, Enamel... Does it remind you something ?

Hi everyone!

Today's post is meant to be a sort of time travel, and a naive exhibition too. If I am always happy to repaint my old minis in today's standard, I also appreciate to bring memories back from the past, and to see these minis as they were. Before I finished to repaint all of them (I don't really worry, I am so slow, and I have so many of them), I took time today to take pictures of these old dear toys.

When I was a child, I first played with the minis out of the box, without any paint at all. But one Christmas, my brother received a fabulous gift that would change everything: a box of Playmobil Colors. Do you remember them ? The men, the horses, their equipment, everything was white, and you were meant to add the color with a set of dedicated pencils. An example below:


I don't remember how long it took before I realized that these pencils could be used on other plastic minis... but as soon as it came to my mind, I started to color every mini I had. In those days, my 1/72 soldiers were Airfix and Atlantic.

Let me show you my gallery:

Atlantic Greek civilians

Atlantic court of Pharaoh

Airfix Tarzan figures
Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham's men

But it was impossible to represent armors without metallic colors, so I was encouraged to use model paints, and I discovered the Humbrol Enamel paints. I am sure you remember :) How I hated the smell of the White Spirit...


And other minis got painted too:

Atlantic gladiators

Atlantic Romans - the less accurate set ever... The blue one was my first zombie experiment :)

Years later, I began to use acrylic paints, but without shades and lights.

Airfix Robin Hood's men

Many years passed before I tried other techniques, and you can see the actual style on this blog.
A few pictures to compare the different steps:

Atlantic Egyptians: Playmobil color / Humbrol / acrylic

Airfix: Acrylic without shades / with shades

Airfix archers in today's standard.

I hope you like them all, even the old ones. Do you have a similar experience ?
Thank you for reading this far.

6 commentaires:

  1. Very similar experience, although I never knew of the Playmobil colours. Along with Humbrol (mostly gloss and I´ve still got a lot of them, all still useable)I even tried wall paints, any old lead paints I could find and fingernail polish..the last two really did smell :-)

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  2. Great figs and a great walk through your 'hobby evolution'. Its so interesting to learn how and why we do the things we do the way we do.

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  3. Thank you all for your kind comments.

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  4. You have a real talent for making the most of these figures, I could never really get to grips with them.

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    Réponses
    1. Thank you Russ. As a child I played a lot with them, I probably think they deserve a second life :)

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