My love affair with cheap spray paint has spanned my modeling history. I’ve always been a fan of the big rattle cans, not the tiny hobby ones, but the monster Home Depot size. I have dozens of cans in the shop and use them regularly, but my go too can is always the super cheap flat black. I don’t know when my reliance on this stuff became real, but I know that when I can’t find it and I start getting low I genuinely start to panic.

I mainly use it as a primer for all my models. I discovered early on that flat black shows flaws WAY better than standard grey or white. Just a quick glance along a car body or custom made part with the shop lights behind it can turn microscopic divots into craters, and can magnify the smallest flaw. After the flaws are picked out the cheap flat paint is a cinch to sand off to reveal the contours and problems, it has NEVER clogged sandpaper or started to peal up, and the fairing is down to the nanometer.

The can on the left is from Walmart (I think) it is the last of that brand in the shop for now. I find it to be the best one there is. It dries in a few minutes and can be sanded right away, and once you get a light coat down as a base, you can lay it on thick and then it acts as a scratch and pit filler. The can on the right is the 99 cent stuff from Home Depot, it’s good, but it takes a little longer to dry and has a little more sheen to it which makes it inferior to the Walmart stuff for “proofing” contours.

The Cadillac body is getting the final coats and is almost flawless. I’ll end up sanding this coat almost completely off and that will reveal how I’m doing, and if it’s still not perfect then I can just blast it again and start over.