Oh my, I am in a foul mood tonight. My team just lost to a Big 12 team. Nope, I have zero respect for that football conference. And really zero respect for the team that we lost to given the antics of #10 at the close of the first half.
So in the hope of ridding my focus of this, I will turn my attention to my builds for this year. This year has not been a great one for me, losing my job in February and still looking for my next position as the year is closing out. But it did give me a lot of time at the bench.
I count 19 builds.
I started this year with 4 kits at about 50% completion on the bench, all P-39 Airacobras. Not sure if I should count those as 2016 builds but they were completed in 2016, so I'll count them.
Accurate Miniatures 1/48 P-400 Airacobra
Eduard 1/48 P-39 Airacobra (which is actually a re-boxing of the Accurate Miniatures kit in their ProfiPack series)
Monogram 1/48 P-39 Airacobra
Revell 1/32 P-39D Airacobra (re-boxing of the Special Hobby kit with the Eduard BigEd set)
Next came a couple of the new Bandai Star Wars kits, a sand trooper and Boba Fett.
Back to WWII aviation, a Revell Heinkel He 111 P-1 in gigantic 1/32 scale.
The Heinkel proved to be really difficult to photograph. I typically take all my photos on neutral colored paper atop my work bench but no matter how I turned it, I could not get it positioned on the work bench and keep all the back ground clutter out of the pictures. Turned out to continue to be a problem in my breakfast room as well.
Trumpeter 1/48 Vickers Wellington Mk. III
This one has since been donated to the Scale Model Gallery aboard the USS Lexington museum in Corpus Christi, Texas.
This one marked the first time I used Stynylrez primer, and that has paid off for many of the builds that followed.
Accurate Miniatures 1/48 SB2U-3 Vindicator
Italeri 1/48 Henschel Hs-123 A-1
Next came a quartet of F4F Wildcats.
Hobby Boss 1/48 F4F-4 Wildcat
Monogram 1/48 F4F-4 Wildcat (back-dated to a -3 and custom detailed interior)
Revell 1/32 F4F-4 Wildcat (some custom interior work as well)
Tamiya 1/48 F4F-4 Wildcat
Hasegawa 1/48 Kawanishi N1K1-Ja Shiden Type 11 Koh "George"
First use of the salt technique for the paint chipping.
Tamiya 1/48 Hyakushiki Shitei III Kai Air Defense Fighter "Dinah"
Back to Star Wars with the Bandai 1/48 X-Wing (moving edition)
I built this one with anticipation for Rogue One, which unlike the Aggies, did not disappoint.
Now on to my final builds for the year, a pair of F-86F Sabre jets. The first was a Christmas gift for my dad, who had seen a photograph of the jet that I modeled and asked me to build that one for him. The second sports a rarely seen camouflage scheme that I found irrestible.
Hasegawa 1/48 F-86F Sabre "Skyblazers"
Monogram 1/48 F-86F Sabre
This one features custom painted yellow diamond over black stripes and custom decals, including an ode to the ill-fated character "Porkins" from Star Wars.
I think the Heinkel is my favorite, although I feel I did pretty good work on many of these. I was not so happy with the weathering on the sand trooper (should have been a lot dirtier), and I didn't think the Boba Fett kit was a very good one at all. I enjoyed employing a new technique with the salt chipping. And I feel like I had pretty decent coverage of the major powers of WWII, missing out on Italians and Russians.
Looking forward to 2017, to a new job meaning fewer builds and to employing yet another new (for me) technique, the dot weathering technique.