Hi,
here is my interpretation of red-nose Yak-3. This was my little side "project" together with other 3 kits in 1:48.
It started with this my kit:
It is original 1:72 kit from Kovozavody Prostejov I built some 25 years ago. It was painted dark green/dark brown (what a wonder
) and later served as a basement for weathering experiments.
Influenced enough by sovietwarplanes.com I decided to update it a bit and this picture was my inspiration:
There are different "hardware" imperfections (shape of the spinner, exhaust pipes...) and mistakes (legs of the main landing gears have wrong propensity...)
I broke away covers of landing gears and replaced them by PE parts.
I tried also to correct legs of the main landing gears but they started to break in different positions than I wanted. Final correction would require a lot more effort than intended so I left them as they were.
Old decals were removed, kit was sanded and sprayed with Mr. Gunze surfacer. Then AKAN acrylics AMT11/AMT12 grey + AMT7 blue were sprayed according to the "splinter" NKAP scheme.
I masked front fuselage and sprayed Revell 31 Red. It was quite similar to AKAN AII red.
Then I masked a star on the spinner and front fuselage sprayed with mixture of Revell 31 and Black. Mixed in bottle in the evening the final color looked quite good (dark red), even very similar to dark red flag decal on the tail. Next day morning fuselage unmasked and star on the spinner was very nice. But the color during the day light looked completely different - it was not dark red but brown.
So I masked it again and sprayed with Revell 34, which is a bit darker than Revell 31.
AML Decal were applied and all kit sprayed with mixture of Matt and semi gloss coat. Red front fuselage, red stars and red flag on the tail were polished a bit with floor wax.
Red star on the spinner is not so apparent now but still visible.
The final result is far from perfect but it looks much better on the shelf among other planes
Regards,
66misos