What's on my desk? Part 84.
Hello and welcome!
Temperatures are going up again. Stay inside, close the curtains and build! It'll be too hot to paint, so why not start a new project? :-)
Like I did, but more of that later.
First off, the BT is finished! I added rain marks to the turret, smeared some mud over the tracks and rusted out the exhausts. I used my usual technique of Streaking Rust, Light Rust Wash and pigments (Europe Earth in this case), using a piece of paper to protect the hull below:
And here's the end result.
Front:
Back:
Side:
It's the first time I used the Wet Effects product for rain marks. It's looking okay, but I need more practice and next time I'll have to look up some more reference pictures.
The Williams then. I found a Portuguese company (Fire Scale Modeller) that makes the exact colours for this vehicle. I ordered a bottle of the blue colour and I'm hoping that it will be a match for the Tamiya decals.
Meanwhile, I messed up the vertical ends of the back wing. Tamiya provides blue decals to go over this, but I don't want to lose any of the fine detail here. Paint is better, but I used an incorrect mix of blue, then made it worse by brushing gloss varnish over it... It looked very very bad:
So my favourite paint stripper to the rescue: oven cleaner! Spray some in a cup, apply with an old toothbrush, let it work for a minute, then scrub all the paint off. The oven cleaner will attack the paint, but leave the polystyrene plastic untouched. Here are the parts, back to their original white plastic, and awaiting the blue I ordered.
If the blue is good and nothing else goes wrong, I expect one or two more weeks of work.
On to the next project, then. I like building things that are a bit special and rare. The BT is a good example of that, and this time my eye fell on the Arma Hobby PZL P.11c I had in my stash. Arma Hobby is a newish (2013) Polish company and I've heard nothing but good things about them. I also have one of their Hurricanes.
This is the kit:
First off, a little history. PZL is a Polish aircraft manufacturer. They were the main producer of bombers and fighters for the Polish Air Force from 1933 until 1939. The P.11 first flew in 1931 and was pretty modern for its time. However, by 1939 the design was completely outclassed: slow and lightly armed, but sturdy and very manoeuverable. The Polish pilots were able to shoot down about 100 German planes.
In the box you find one (1!) sprue of plastic, plus one small transparent sprue with the windscreen. This is the 'Expert Set', so you also get some PE and paint masks.
The P.11 is small, so small I keep thinking I'm building a 1/72 kit instead of 1/48...
I primed with black and airbrushed Flat Aluminium over the inside of the cockpit. The ribs were given a bit of contrast with Neutral Wash and the inside of the leather edging (but not the outside yet) was picked out with Burnt Sienna oil paint:
The cockpit itself is composed of a number of very small parts, and I apparently already lost some of them... Not a big deal, this won't be very visible after assembly. I used the same colours here, and added some pigments on the floor. Again, this is a small plane. See the euro coin for size comparison. :-)
The headrest I left unpainted for now. As I'm using oil (notoriously slow-drying) and this will remain exposed (the P.11 is an open-cockpit design) I'll be rubbing off paint constantly. Better leave it for now and come back to it later.
This is how the cockpit will sit in the fuselage:
Very nice detail for such a small kit.
The instrument board was painted in Satin Black, and the instruments themselves are two decals: the first one has only the colours of the dials, the second one has the markings and indicator needles. A nice touch, because it means you could paint the dials yourself, then use only the markings (which are next to impossible to paint).
I just used both decals, with a drop of Sol to make sure they settle down into the detail:
That's it for now.
Still some spots open for the airbrush workshop next week!
See you next week!