Every few months check and refresh your paint supplies.  Whichever paints you use acrylics, enamels, or other solvent-based paint it is a good practice to check up on your paints and to give them a good shaking.  Check your bottled paints, do they need to be refreshed with a dab of water or mineral spirits?  What about your marker\paint pens?  Then you might also want to do a spot check on your glues, putty, clay, stains, and pigments, to make sure they are in usable condition.

A favorite animated film of mine is "The Man Who Planted Trees".  In it, a man spends a lifetime planting trees, and in different ways, affecting thousands [ ... ]

A few days ago I received the set that I REALLY wanted in the first place - the 81862 30th Anniversary set from 2002.

For some inexplicable reason Marklin [ ... ]

Scratch building is defined in Wikipedia as “The process of building a scale model "from scratch", ie. from raw materials, rather than building it from [ ... ]