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This is the 1974 Comic Scenes reissue of the classic 1960s Aurora Amazing Spider-Man kit. There were a handful of changes from the original 1966 kit (missing parts, mainly: Kraven's gun, the soft drink can, and the Spider-Man nameplate), none of which bothered me. The main sculpts for Spidey and Kraven the Hunter were identical to the original kit.

This particular kit has a long story behind it, so bear with me -- after all, it took me almost three years to build!

I first picked up this kit back in late 1999 on eBay. I had every intention of building it up pronto, and in fact did get started on it. But after I got the main paint job done, it was time to paint the webbing on Spidey's tights, and... well, it was pretty intimidating. I'm not very good with fine details, or with drawing a straight line, and I simply lost motivation. The half-completed model went into storage, and I started working on something else.

Years pass...

It's now summer 2002, and the new Spider-Man movie is in theaters. (It's a really good movie, too -- if you haven't seen it yet, you should.) All of a sudden I get inspired to work on the Spider-Man model again. I open my cabinet drawers, find all the pieces and parts, put Spidey on the table, and get ready to start working again.

Except...

When I first started working on the model (back in 1999, remember), I used Ral Partha flat acrylics. Big problem. Since then, Ral Partha went out of business, and I had no way of obtaining new paints to match the old paint. (And, of course, all my old Ral Partha paints had since dried up.) If I wanted to work on the Spidey model, I had to start from scratch.

Which meant stripping all the paint from the old model.

I'd never done any wholesale paint stripping before, so I was completely at a loss on what to do next. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Bonedigger's Web page that evaluated various paint strippers, and went straight to my auto parts store to buy a big jug of Castrol Super Clean Degreaser. It worked! I let the old kit soak overnight in a bowl of degreaser, and all the old paint just lifted off. (I thought this would be a particularly hard job, as the original kit had tons of paint on it; I'd primed it in black -- not my usual gray -- and thus had to apply about a gazillion coats of red and blue to get Spidey's costume right.)

So now I had a (relatively) fresh model to start over with -- which I did. As with all the Aurora kits, there was a bit of sanding and puttying to be done. One particular beef I have with the Aurora models is where the seams fall. Those old Aurora kits were such great realistic sculpts, then they go and break the things apart at the most conspicuous places. In Spidey's case, the top half of his body was split along the top of his head (and down the sides, of course). There's probably no good place to break a spandex uniform, but right on top of his head? To make matters worse, you have the costume's webbing to deal with, so if you try to sand or putty the seams, you end up obliterating the web pattern -- which makes for all sorts of problems later. So I opted for a minimalist approach to sanding and puttying.

Once Spidey was all glued and sanded and puttied, it was time to paint. This time around I went with a selection of craft acrylics (thanks, Hobby Lobby!). This was actually a difficult kit to paint (webbing aside), because of the complexity of the base. The bulk of the base was wood (drybrushing dark brown on black, no big deal), but then you had Kraven the Hunter.

Whoever designed Kraven's outfit (Steve Ditko?) must have been on some really good drugs. The guy wears this patchwork of different animal skins, including a zebra-skin belt and bracelets, a lion-skin vest, some sort of cheetah-skin tights -- man, it's just butt ugly! Plus, it's a bear to paint, with all those different colors. (And if you get the color scheme wrong, it looks like technicolor barf -- and draws attention away from the hero of the piece.) I ended up simplifying the costume a bit, changing the zebra-skin to bronze, and going with a series of browns that hopefully don't clash too much. (The light brown hair on his vest is actually drybrushed over black.)

To finish off the base, I went with a light blue for the scroll or tapestry or whatever it is that Kraven was trying to steal. I thought about white or off-white, but it drew too much attention that way; I also tried a darker blue, but that started to compete with Spidey's long johns, so the lighter route was best.

Now we have the Amazing Spider-Man hisself. Since this model was first released in 1966, we're talking the original Steve Ditko Spidey outfit, without the big bug eyes and fiddly fine webbing of the Todd McFarlane era. I went with a kind of shiny dark blue (Delta's Phthalo Blue) and a solid dark red (Anita's Dark Red) for the main parts of Spidey's tights, and then had to deal with the webbing. I knew I wasn't a good enough painter to paint the lines, so I decided to draw them, instead, using an ultra-fine point engineer's pen. The only problem here is that I'm no better at drawing a straight line than I am with painting one (plus some of the webbing mold had been sanded or puttied over), and the results were all over the place -- literally! Well, I started to touch up the bad lines with the red paint, which was pretty thin, and ended up doing a kind of a drybrush/wash blend that covered the black ink just enough to even out most of my mistakes -- and keep the black from standing out too prominently against the red. The result is surprisingly pleasing to the eye, and belies the fact that I can't draw a straight line with a ruler.

The web that Spidey is shooting is painted with three different colors, each drybrushed over the last. I started with a base of black, then drybrushed gray over that, then drybrushed silver over that. It ended up looking okay. My only big change to the kit was to go with a gold metallic for the background web. I can't remember what color I painted this when I was a kid (red, probably), but the gold definitely works quite well in highlighting the main figure.

Whew! That was a lot of work, but well worth it. This is one of Aurora's coolest kits. I really liked it as a kid, and I like it still today.