There exist many types of glue and adhesives. In the world of model building, there are many different ways to fasten or attach things. For each of these processes, different types of glue can be useful.
Elmer’s White Glue – Elmer’s glue is your basic school glue. It generally dries clear. It is somewhat thin, and therefore does not lend itself to the building of dimensional objects. Elmer’s Glue is best for gluing pieces of paper to other pieces of paper. One way to do this is by watering the glue down slightly. This thins it to more of the consistency of paint, allowing you to paint it on with a paintbrush, therefore getting it only exactly where it needs to be. Elmer’s glue does not take paint well, so any surface will need gesso-ing before painting.
Tacky Glue / Sobo – Tacky Glue is much thicker than Elmer’s Glue. Therefore it lends itself easily to gluing together dimensional pieces, such as cut-and-fold furniture. One major downside to Tacky Glue is its slow drying time. You will end up spending a lot of your time holding pieces together, waiting for them to dry.
Spray Adhesive – Spray adhesive comes in an aerosol can. It is best used for evenly attaching paper patterns to Bristol board or foamcore. The upside to spray adhesive is that is applies quickly and evenly. IF you use little enough, you can attach a pattern, cut the piece out, and then remove the pattern. The downside to spray adhesive has the same origin as its upside. Since it comes out of an aerosol can, it covers a large area at once, often a much larger area than you need. This requires putting down paper or something else to protect your work surface, since another downside is that anywhere you put spray adhesive will remain sticky indefinitely.
Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive – Quick Dry adhesive is like Tacky Glue without its one major downside; the drying time. It dries twice as fast as Tacky Glue, meaning you waste less time sitting holding two pieces of Bristol board together. It is a good all-purpose glue for model building.
Krazy Glue – Krazy Glue dries crazy fast. It works well for quickly repairing pieces that have broken. It comes in very small tubes, in liquid or gel form. The Gel is often easier to work with, as it doesn’t drip all over the place.