Book Review: Small Scale Armour Modelling, Alex Clark

N.B: This is another of my occasional archival posts. In this case of a book I bought ages ago, and reviewed over on the Amazon U.K. website.

First of all I'd like to say that the information in this book is, for my purposes, five-star material. I'm docking one star in this review because the pictures in the Kindle edition I bought via Amazon aren't up to snuff, in my view.

This was both the first book on model-making I've ever bought (prior to this I relied on my prior knowledge/experience and stuff I've gleaned from the ever-useful interweb), and my first ever Kindle purchase, for use on the Kindle app on an iPad. A friend has this book in its spiral-bound book form, and it seemed to me his modelling has clearly benefitted from Alex Clark's expert input. So I thought I'd give it a punt.

The content is great, moving from basics, such as the tools you ought to have, through mid level stuff on how best to paint and assemble your models, to more advanced stuff on conversions and suchlike, even getting into stuff like casting your own resin parts! I benefitted from the advice immediately, starting with a series of tool purchases. And I know I'll continue to return to the book, which can be read cover to cover or just dipped into as needed.

Clark writes very well, in clear, concise but inspiring prose. And the text displays well in the Kindle app. My only gripe is that the pictures aren't always next to their captions, and, worse, they aren't sufficiently clear/high quality. Zooming in on them doesn't make the visual info clearer, but reveals the images to be pixelated low-res affairs.

Still, the information content is first rate, and the saving getting this on Kindle was so large I feel the loss of image quality is tolerable, just. If the images could be improved I'd give this five stars. But even as it is I'd highly recommend it to the budding Panzer nut, or any small scale AFV (or similar) builder.