Thanks folks. I do believe I'm finished. To recap, its the Hasegawa A6M2 Model 21 in the markings of Petty Officer 1st Class Shigenori Nishikaichi off the carrier Hiryu on the morning of December 7th 1941. The scene is depicted just before take off, as if Nishikaiachi had posed for a quick picture before jumping into the cockpit. At least that's what I was going for....
Reference the kit itself, its nice but has wing root issues. My advice is to glue the upper wings to the wing roots first. I used the controversial XF-76 Grey Green to represent the "Ame-hiro" color of the early Zeros. These planes were fairly new so I kept weathering to a minimum. I even left a slight sheen on the plane to depict this. The plane received engine wiring and brake lines from fuse wire and the only aftermarket addition was an Ultracast seat. The decals are a mixture of the kit's sheet and Berna. The pilot is one of the four choices that came with the Tamiya A6M5 I built last year. The "chunk" of Hiryu was taken from a illustration I found online. I painted cardboard stock to replicate this particular section. It's a tad one dimensional but it was much cheaper than those aftermarket bases.
Notes regarding the pilot: Figure painting is not my strong point. As I said, it's one of the pilot figures in the new tooled Tamiya Zero series. These are nicely detailed and I brush painted my example with Tamiya Paints using the side of the box as reference (glad I saved it). It was then washed with a brown Detailer wash. This may or may not be the same uniform the pilots wore at Pearl Harbor. I doubt they changed much. I had read that Japanese pilots carried ceremonial Samurai swords, so I chose to include this.
The said Illustration of the Hiryu deck. I opted to replicate the area with the green circle
The "snapshot"..
Reality....
The rest...
Thanks for following The D3A1 Val that George Welch shot down is coming soon too.
Joe