Hobby color - ostrá červená

A rich red for insignia, stripes and warning surfaces

The shade aims at a clearly legible red, the kind vehicles and aircraft carry wherever a surface has to catch the eye at first glance. The binder is acrylic and it is thinned with water or with the maker's own thinner, so the paint can be worked with at a desk without special extraction and the brushes are easy to clean.

It takes both of the usual routes to application. Under a brush the shade is laid on almost unthinned and in thin strokes, so that the older layer underneath is not dissolved; for an airbrush it is thinned to roughly the consistency of milk and laid down in several light passes. A pure red has weaker covering power by its nature, so a white or light gray base belongs underneath it - on bare dark plastic the tone would look muddy and go brown.

Its uses are wide: national insignia and fuselage bands, warning stripes on propeller blades, the marking of emergency panels, fire extinguishers and other small details in a cockpit, the sporting colors of civilian aircraft or the bodies of car models. Once the coat has dried it can be clear-coated with a flat or gloss transparent without any trouble before the decals go on.

The bottle has to be shaken thoroughly before work, as the pigment settles at the bottom. Any remainder on the palette thickens quickly, so mix only as much paint as one session will use.

Making the bottle last

How long the contents last depends above all on keeping the neck clean. Dried rings on the thread stop the cap seating, air gets inside and within a few months the paint thickens to the point of being unusable; wiping the rim after every session is therefore worth the moment it takes. It is better to take paint out with a pipette into a shallow dish than to dip a brush straight into the stock, where the remains of a previous shade and fibers from the bristles otherwise end up.