Now that school is out for the Christmas holidays, my 15 year-old son and I are going to be building the 1:72 Airfix A-4 Skyhawk kits together. I happen to have 2 of them and he's interested in learning more about building models. So I figured this would be a good opportunity for us to build side by side. I did this with my (now 22 year old) twins several years ago with F-22's. It was quite fun and their models turned out well while they learned some good building skills.
I'm going to build mine as an A-4P from Argentina, and he hasn't decided which A-4B he'll build, but I have a ton of decal options for him. We started with the cockpit, as per the instructions and particularly with the bang seats. The kit doesn't include the prominent ejection handle so I scavenged a couple from a Fujimi A-4J kit that I had used resin seats on and we each built the seats with the handles added and a bit of styrene on top. Mine is on the left and his is on the right, below:
Don't worry about the seams- they will be covered up.
After airbrushing the main parts and then picking out details, we let the paint dry. Then we put a wash over everything to pull out details. I put an Argentine flag on my pilot's sleeve, though you can't see it from this angle and while I normally paint and scratchbuild details in the cockpit, since he wanted to use the decals, I'll be using the decals as well.
And here is his version:
I actually think his seat looks a bit better than mine.
Tomorrow we'll add the control decals and dullcoat everything here. Also note that the large ejector pin marks in the cockpit will be completely covered by the seat so we didn't bother completely getting rid of them.
Anyway, these should be fun to work on over the next couple weeks and I hope he'll pick up some useful skills. Thanks for looking!
I'm going to build mine as an A-4P from Argentina, and he hasn't decided which A-4B he'll build, but I have a ton of decal options for him. We started with the cockpit, as per the instructions and particularly with the bang seats. The kit doesn't include the prominent ejection handle so I scavenged a couple from a Fujimi A-4J kit that I had used resin seats on and we each built the seats with the handles added and a bit of styrene on top. Mine is on the left and his is on the right, below:
Don't worry about the seams- they will be covered up.
After airbrushing the main parts and then picking out details, we let the paint dry. Then we put a wash over everything to pull out details. I put an Argentine flag on my pilot's sleeve, though you can't see it from this angle and while I normally paint and scratchbuild details in the cockpit, since he wanted to use the decals, I'll be using the decals as well.
And here is his version:
I actually think his seat looks a bit better than mine.
Tomorrow we'll add the control decals and dullcoat everything here. Also note that the large ejector pin marks in the cockpit will be completely covered by the seat so we didn't bother completely getting rid of them.
Anyway, these should be fun to work on over the next couple weeks and I hope he'll pick up some useful skills. Thanks for looking!
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