Dauntless

Hasegawa's 1/48 kit. The dive brakes were molded onto the wings. Cut them off, and hand-drilled the holes. Local dark-gray flat spraypaint primer top and sides, matte-white undersides. Craftstore acrylic washes of blue, gray, and white for color variation, followed by assorted dry pastels from the nearby art-supply shop. Canopy frame is electrical tape painted and pastelled like the rest of the plane.

Zero

1/48 Japanese Zero. First Tamiya airplane kit I've assembled, at age 65. They are usually more detailed and expensive than suits me, but the price was right on this little kit. Gray-green local (Ecuador) spraypaint basecoat, mottled with 4 shades of craftstore acrylic green. Canopy framing, thin strips of electrical tape.

Air-to-Air Refueling

 Another turkey-bone project:

Dirigible

Latest turkey-bone extravaganza, inspired by primitive mid-to-late 19th-century dirigibles, and Greek windmills. Total out-of-pocket cost, not counting the turkey and broken blowdryer, about $15 for balsa wood, styro balls, plastic string and mono fishing line. Mylar and bamboo-skewer wings, spheres spraypainted with assorted dull colors, and rubbed here and there with pastels. 32" long. 1:40 scale, as the pilot is the driver from an old box-scale (1957) Revell T-34 tank kit. 

Tupolev 2, #2

My second 1/72 Tupolev 2, molds done by the East German company VEB Plasticart in 1977. Not state of the art even then: offbeat construction, difficult fit, weird plastic, chunky detail. Still, it looks like a Tu-2, which is pretty much what matters to me. I really like red stars, and thought the black-green camo would make them pop. The kit came with white-outlined red star decals. The red needed to abut the green and black to get the maximum impact, so I made some stencils and spray-painted solid-red stars. First photo is green-painted plane masked with local Play-Doh before spraying on the black. As usual, craftstore acrylics, hardware store spraypaint, and dry pastels.

1992 Children

        Recently recovered photo of two of my kids and two neighbor's kids from about 30 years ago:

Monet's Dinghy

This scratchbuilt boat was inspired by this painting by Claude Monet. A copy hangs in our house.
 

Much of the raw material was locally-sourced stuff that I already had: bamboo skewers, wood stain, hors d'oeuvre toothpicks, drapery cloth, wire. The rest came from the scrap-box. The only things I had to buy were two sheets of balsa wood and Krazyglue for less than $4. I scaled the model such that the hull was the length of a balsa sheet, or 2.33 times bigger than the hull in my A4-size printout. Then it was simply a matter of multiplying the sizes of the boat's pieces in the painting by 2.33 to have the model retain the same proportions. Colors are craftstore acrylics and wood stain. 

Progress shots start with free-download paper-model boat patterns I used to get a good likeness of the hull.

The nearest thing to plans I used on this project:

Oseberg

Billings' Boats Oseberg done. Nice to work on a relatively large-scale ship (1/25) with a simple sailplan and minimal rigging. Local woodstain and sail fabric.

FB-111, 1980s

Monogram's 1/72 EF-111 kit, molds from 2001. Modified a bit to be an FB-111, because I prefer the FB's color scheme.  As usual, minimal decals, handpainted acrylics,  and dry pastels.