Panther

France, Autumn 1944. I don't care for Allied tanks in WW2, but I do like the US Army uniform palette. And I like the German armor 3-color camo scheme. So this is a cherry-picking 1/35 diorama of stuff I'm interested in. Tamiya and DML Dragon US soldiers, and Italeri's 1993 Panther. The kit comes with optional Zimmerit panels, but I enjoy doing my own. I like the Panther's clean lines, and left off brackets, tow cables, tools, etc. that to me just add visual clutter. Likewise no markings or much weathering leaves the camo scheme intact. As usual I used craftstore acrylic paint, and for the first time in about 50 years, handbrushed everything. The picture framers made the frame too big (miscommunication on my part), so I cut a mat out of a pizza box to make up the difference.

Memory

Long ago I used to sail at the drop of a hat. I had a friend, Bob, a retired engineer who lived in a house on the lake. Probably 40 years my senior, but sailing can erase such differences. He had a bigger boat, a Venture 24 I think, much easier to sail than the little 420 I hiked out on. So when we were both out alone on frigid winter days, I'd leave my boat at his dock and we'd schmooze on his Venture.

I had (still have) another friend, Marco, an Italian grad student from a peach-growing family near Bologna. Soon enough he was sailing too, and the 3 of us would coalesce on Bob's Venture. Marco was doing a thesis on how the quantity of light that fell on individual branches of a given peachtree affected the peaches. He was making these little thumb-joint-sized boxes from scratch with photo-sensitive cells that generated a tiny, but measureable, amount of electricity. And the guinea-pig trees had these boxes fastened to their branches, and the electrical data went into something with a memory, and it was all more than I related to as a young architect. One afternoon I was driving Bob's Venture while he and Marco discussed the photo-boxlets, and how they could be finessed to provide the same quality information from each one, and all that sorta stuff. We glissando'd on the water for an hour like that. I was happy to manage the boat, saying nothing, while they thought big and little about the thesis. Setting aside epiphanies about my family, this was arguably the most-human moment I can remember from my life thus far.

The mundane can be crazy heavenly.

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.