D-Day stripes

my painting skills exactly!

Craig

It really comes down to one thing in the end - at a model contest can you convince the judge that's the way it was.

Val Kraut

Val Kraut said the following on 30/09/2008 01:21:

Have the picture in miniature framed beside it and get some miniature ground crew in the exact same position as the picture.

nodnodnod

There's a very fine line that modellers walk sometimes. We know that temporary markings like these were less than perfect, but just how far do we go to portray them accurately? In many cases, an accurate portrayal will just look like bad workmanship.

Quite a number of years ago, I built a Heller Messerchmitt Bf-109K. I had found an interesting colour scheme in Scale Models magazine which showed an aircraft with a very sparse mottle on the fuselage sides and a hand-painted code number of 206 aft of the fuselage Balkenkreuze. I faithfully replicated the crooked hand-painted numbering style and was very pleased with the result. Unfortunately, when I displayed it at the next meeting of my modelling club, it caused some raised eyebrows. I was taken to one side by the club guru (the club was on an RAF station, so the guru was *always* right simply because he was a squadron leader) who asked me in a very patronising manner "Couldn't you have found some suitable decals? That's really not the standard we aim for here."

Railway modellers have similar problems. Have a look at photographs of some steam locomotives. Sometimes you will see them with cabs that are so out-of-true that they look like ricketty garden sheds! I once tried replicating this, again working from a photo, but the result looked so dreadful that I pulled the cab apart and rebuilt it using a set-square!

A few years ago one modeler thought he found references that the late war German tanks were primed in red and that the crews painted them camoflage - his belief was the interior of the drive wheels and under hull would have been left red. Again the caution - first you have to convince the judges. And the argument still goes on about the colors of the Battleships at Pearl Harbor.

The one thing that really struck me witth the photo was - I've worked with guys who were there and spoke about waxing the aircraft to get an extra 10 mph up in the air. With that white "putty" on the wings this plane must have lost 20mph.

Val Kraut