Idly scrolling through Facebook I came across an image of this excellent plastic kit painted, but still on its sprue, displayed in a box picture frame, and I thought to myself that looks really good!
This got me thinking that maybe I could have a go at this too, just to try something completely different. That's when a visit to Lidl's came in to the picture. Their Summer Madness promotion on Airfix starter kits was just coming to an end and all they had left was the 1/72nd Sherman Vc Firefly - could the same idea work with a tank?
Until I opened the box I hadn't realised that this is a completely new tooling kit, made in the "Quick-build style" with complete track/running gear mouldings. All the parts are on two identical sized sprues - perfect for my purposes - and would easily fit into a frame of roughly 30 x 30cm.
The first job was to prime everything. As the kit was moulded in a light green coloured plastic I chose to spray it grey to ensure there was sufficient contrast once the tank parts were painted in their olive drab.
To achieve this, I carefully masked the sprue sections before airbrushing Vallejo Olive Drab over all the tank parts.
The next step was to dry-brush all the model surfaces with a lighter mix of white & olive green to break-up the larger areas.
Then the details were picked out - pioneer tools, tracks etc.
The decals were added before Army Painter Strong Tone was used to pick out the areas of shade. Finally the entire model was lightly dry-brushed with Vallejo Iraqi Sand. I also used Strong Tone to shade the sprue names & numbers before dry-brushing light grey just to make them stand out a bit. That was the painting finished.
I found a suitable frame in Ikea. Called SANNAHED it was actually 35 x 35cm and had about 30mm depth between the glass and the rear board. These were on special offer at £10 so I bought two ready to try another project with an aircraft kit. It had a nicely cut mounting card, but this was too wide to use so I dicarded it. I painted the rear board with a Dulux match pot of a neutral stone colour before attaching parts of the original kit box and the kit itself. The card box art was attached using double sided tape and the kit sprues etc. were secured with thin fuse wire.
And there you have it - finished.
On a separate note the kit itself looks to be very good. The levels of detail are good and cleanly moulded. I read somewhere that if you buy the kit on its own (rather than as part of a starter set) it includes an additional sprue of running gear and separate tracks which would probably make a good kit even better. One glaring boo-boo is the inclusion of a bow machine gun! As we all know the Firefly had this gun deleted to increase ammunition stowage!
No comments:
Post a Comment