Mr.Brightside wrote:
I'm not very good at this hobby, but I love it!
If you're having fun, you're doing it right!
US Navy paints in World War Two were designed to be flat as reflecting light (glint) could give away a ship's position. However a couple of factors to consider.
1) Kit decals often do not look good on a flat paint. Air gets under the carrier film and causes an appearance called "silvering." The most common way to prevent this is to either spray a gloss paint or spray a clear gloss coat over a flat paint before applying the decals. This generally leads to a flat coat being required over the gloss coat to take the shine down, but this also seals in the decals and protects them from handling, cleaning, etc. There are "flat coats" and there is also the ability to mix flats and gloss coats to get a more precise sheen that looks more in scale, which brings us to....
2) A lot of builders will take "scale effect" into mind when painting and "weathering." Colors loose their intensity the farther away you get from the surface, so a "true" color may make a model look a little off. As has been said, glossy doesn't look right, but dead flat doesn't either. A lot of what gets labelled as weathering may actually be more of a scale-effect (washes to create shadows around some details, for example).
These are things that many like to do, but they aren't necessary - what matters is how *you* have fun. I always say that a model that never gets finished is a worse job that one that gets slapped together and finished.
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