Artool FX Texture First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Artool produces a series of paint templates including these airbrush masks that have a wide variety of uses for creating textures and other special effects for artists. As a modeler, I instantly saw their application to our hobby - digital camouflage.

If you've seen digital camouflage up close, you can see instantly why it is called digital with all of the multicolored rectangles that create various patters around the subject being camouflaged, none of which look like the item being camouflaged. If you're trying to replicate this effect on 1/35 figures, this can be a really frustrating process - until now. With these templates, you can create the tri-colored digital effect by painting the base color on your subject, then using any of these masks to paint on the blotches of pattern out of the remaining two colors, then coming back with the tiny blocks overlaid in the two remaining colors. With a little practice, you can quickly turn out digital camouflage in use by any services around the world. Want to do other patterns? You can certainly make use of these masks for a variety of other camouflage patterns as well.

This mask set will allow you to easily model contemporary figures to go with your new armored vehicle, tactical vehicle, or support vehicle subjects.

My sincere thanks to Iwata-Medea for this review sample.