The Little World

I’ll amend that. The drones do…sort of. But in the case of the Bristol Bulldog, it needs a human pilot to defend the realm.

Airfix have been good to us for a long time – nearly all of their kits have contained at least one crew member to steer the ship and/or make the sandwiches. They streak ahead of many other makers in this – I am always scrabbling around looking for spare crew for my builds.

Of course, not all aircrew look like they are the right stuff. Many of the early ones are sadly distorted – but I am getting sadly distorted as I get older so who am I to judge. In the case of the Bulldog we have Reginald ” Pip Pip” Fotheringay flying for A Flight, No. 19 Sqn in 1931. In between trips up to London to chase the popsies in Soho.

Reg gets a seat to sit in and a shelf in the fuselage to hold that seat. No stick, no instruments, no tube side walls. Just a green hole to crouch in. To be fair to Airfix, this is not a complaint. Reg pretty well fills the hole and his modelling is actually very good indeed. He’ll be painted with Tamiya acrylic as it makes the best figure paint for this small scale. I have also discovered that the standard grey undercoat is a real help to figure painting as well.

As an aside, the real figure painters have my admiration for the detail and character they can put into tiny cloth. I am content with uniform blues, greens, and khakis and reserve my detailing for the mae west and belt.

In this, and in other detail painting I have slowly been discovering that brushes are not the only things on the workbench. I’ve a set that range from very small indeed to medium flats. They start out well, with sharp points, but I splay these out when I clean them. and eventually the tiny control is gone. So I’ve been experimenting with the following manual aids:

a. Bow pen. My go-to for canopy framing. Also for tyres. I call it my steel brush.

b. Q-tips. Don’t laugh. There are times when a Q-tip and thin varnish are just the effect you need.

c. Satay skewer or cocktail stick. These are getting more of a run on my bench than ever I would have expected. One is my cyanoacrylate applicator and has been gradually sanded into a tiny broad blade. To tell you the truth I saw a packet of Tamiya cyanoacrylate applicators in Hobbytech but quailed at the price, so I just observed what shapes they were and copy them with the wooden sticks. I’m not a canary but I can cheap too…

Another use for the stick is when I carve the end into a little wooden chisel and scrape excess paint off clear canopies.

And finally, the sharper stick is actually a wooden paint brush that stays sharp.