The Little World

I am always intrigued by the colours of the styrene plastic that kit makers choose to mould their little fighter airplanes. I’ve seen silver in early Revell kits, red, blue, oliveish-green from Aurora, and a vile yellow from Monogram. Matchbox outdid them all choosing greens, browns, and greys for their kits. And even went so far as to mould a British training aircraft in Arctic orange and white.

But this offering from Hasegawa is new to me – it’s not green and it’s not black, but it’s something. As a non-paint model for young players it might approximate something that the Japanese Army might choose, but even there I think they’ve gone wide of the mark.

The instructions – excellent, I might add – provide a further call for Malachite green in the cockpit and wheel wells and Google showed this as a surprisingly bright colour. I have no idea whether any of this is real – I’ll just do as I’m told. The Malachite is so unusual I won’t buy a jar – I’ll mix it from leftovers here. And I’m going to experiment with a new pot of Mr. Color Flat base as well, to cut the sheen.