Here's
my Stuka 1/48 diorama which I finished in April 2008. The kit is of typical
Hasegawa quality apart from some slight fitting problems in the horizontal
tails. The thick triangles Hasegawa provided as wing control surface
actuators didn't appeal to me at all, so I replaced them with styrene rod.
I also cut off all the control surfaces in the tail and changed them direction
for greater realism. Some other tiny changes involved the reconstruction
of the bomb release trapese and the aileron mass balance with
photo-etched. In addition, instead of masking and painting the canopy, I
chose to paint thin strips of black adhesive tape and it showed much better this
way! The cockpit was painted RLM 02 and was weathered
accordingly.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Painting
the Stuka in its marvelous Northern Africa camo (also adopted by 1./STG3
for some of its planes which saw action there) with my freshly bought
Badger 150 airbrush, was both a challenging and enjoyable task.
Trying to achieve these dots with a free hand, brought my nerves to their
limits though!! The decals from the kit fitted nicely except for the
"7" and the swastikas which were airbrushed with masks. At
this point I should mention that Gunze colors have always been my
favorite. As for the diorama itself it involves a Hasegawa bomb
loading cart and two figures, some barrels from the spares and some unused
pens. Almost all sand bags were made of epoxy putty.
Last but not least, the table and boxes were made out of balsa wood.
Finally the base was painted mixing different sand and yellow shades and
..and that's all!!! A depressing black and white photo taken in
a plane cemetery in summer 1945(?)showing this very ugly bird almost in
ruins, gave me the motive to give life to it, at least in plastic reality.
(P.S.
The
idea of how to achieve this troublesome but also spectacular paint pattern was
given to me by N. Kavathas in his 1/24 Airfix Stuka kit building back in
1988! It
was also to him that I devoted my gold medal for this diorama in the IPMS
exhibition last year)
Panagiotis Koubetsos
Click on
images below to see larger images
|