Some Relief

I had so many things going all at the same time that in the end I wasn't getting anything done, so I buckled down and finished three WWI biplanes, partly because I like biplanes and partly because like a man undoing his belt buckle after a big meal, I needed to find some extra room. So now I only have about fifteen projects going, not eighteen. Well, we take progress when and as we find it.

Revell's 1/72nd SE 5A. I quite enjoyed this model. It probably doesn't pass serious muster as a kit because it has no interior, and it probably doesn't pass serious muster as a model because I just can't bring myself to rig a 1/72nd scale biplane, but I had fun, and I guess that's the main thing. Amusingly, the pilot figure in this kit is identical to the pilot figure in the Fokker D.VII kit, so I put the German pilot in the British fighter, and the British pilot in the German fighter, just to be perverse. If you disregard the RV in the background, you might almost thing the SE 5 was preparing to fly a mission from some desert aerodrome, perhaps near Damascus.

Normally I use Tamiya "Khaki Drab" to simulate the paint (dope?) on British WWI aeroplanes, but this time I used Testors "Field Drab", which is a little lighter and browner, and a good deal easier to brush paint to boot.

Now, on to Rommel's Rod, whose nose can just be seen in the upper left corner of the top picture.

I always imagine that other modelers have clean, organized, efficient workbenches - places for everything, paints stored in nice racks with the labels out, brushes organized by size and type and handle color. Mine's always a mess. My paint storage solution isn't a very good one, and I have to write the name of the paint on the lid with a silver Sharpie so I can find what I'm looking for. There are odd bits of hacked-up plastic everywhere, brushes dropped wherever they happened to end up, toothpicks, swabs, half-built models, scraps of decal sheets for models I've long since finished... It's such a mess. And just look at the surface of my bench; it looks like I've been butchering cattle, and I suspect I'm the only modeler on the planet lazy enough to test my airbrush by spraying the front edge of my workbench...

Sigh. It isn't easy being me.