We have some Russians in here!
Admittedly, I've never been that familiar with many of the aircraft comprising the VVS. This is largely due to the lack of discussion on the Soviet Union's contributions to WWII in school history class and, going way back to my maternal grandmother's house, where she had a set of encyclopedias that contained, in the A volume for aircraft, a glossy two-page drawing of various WWII aircraft by country, and showed just a couple of airplanes for the Russians.
Here is Accurate Miniatures' Yak-1.
I picked this one up a few years back from Sprue Brothers when they were having an inventory reduction sale. I liked the idea of the skis. The kit was geared toward the skis edition, but it did contain all the parts for conventional landing gear.
So the kit is fairly typical of Accurate Miniatures kits; I say that as one that has built their Avenger, Mitchell, Vindicator, and Sturmovik kits. But unlike those, this one has some finicky stuff to build, notably the cockpit and the skis. The cockpit is fragile once built, and is slotted into the already assembled fuselage from the wing opening. As it happened, I didn't get it set in the correct position, which I only discovered when attempting to fit the rear canopy over the seat bulkhead, which sat too high. I was able to push it down to allow the canopy to clear the bulkhead, but in inspecting the underside, I noticed a significant gap inside the oil cooler, meaning I still didn't get the cockpit structure correctly positioned. By the time I noticed this, it was far too late to do anything about it, but one really has to be looking into the oil cooler to see the issue.
The skis were also fragile. I had some difficultly getting them aligned, and one of them didn't even want to stay in position. I had to develop some patience to let them set once I had them in a position that looked accurate enough.
Paint. I considered purchasing a paint set for Russian aircraft, but given that I have only 3 in my stash with no real plans to get any additional Soviet subjects, I opted to use what I had on hand. The Yak was often painted in dark green + black on the top and light blue on the underside. I initially planned to use some Italian colors I have - a Polly Scale dark olive green, Polly Scale light gray blue, and Tamiya NATO black. The light gray turned out to favor the gray rather than the blue, which is what photos I found indicated the underside should be. I ended up using Vallejo RLM 76 light blue in a somewhat ironic move, given that the RLM color is a Luftwaffe color.
The white was initially going to be heavily thinned Tamiya white, but at one point I recalled the white Stynylrez primer comes out of the bottle pretty thin. I went with that and sprayed at a lower PSI than normal, I think it was about 12 PSI, in light coats to allow some of the underlying color to either show through or be easy to reveal with sanding. I was only partially successful at this. The wing's leading edges are what I was going for for other areas of the Yak, but I was unable to sand enough of the white away with concern of removing the underlying colors as well.
Weathering is ground pastels to replicate the exhaust stains, and Flory wash everywhere else. Aside from the instrument panel, I did not use any of the kit decals. I instead used the Montex Mask set for the Yak to do the red stars and the 23. I used a flat brush to stipple white around those markings (I believe the Russians would paint their markings over a hastily painted on white background, but stand to be corrected on that).
I built this one alongside the Accurate Miniatures Sturmovik, which I will post shortly. My next build will stay in the VVS with Zvezda's Pe-2 in 1/48.