Splashcoat
New Member
- Joined
- Oct 9, 2010
- Messages
- 421
Here are a few photographs of my latest effort, a P-40X from the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It represents the plane flown by the main character, Joe “Sky Captain†Sullivan.
Although not stated as such in the film, the plane is a modified P-40 Warhawk so I used the 1/48 scale Hasagawa kit of a P-40K as the starting point and made some modifications of my own. The biggest change I made was to modify the single-seat airframe to a two-seater by carving out the area behind the pilot’s seat (this area originally housed a fuel tank) and adding a bulkhead and passenger’s seat. The rear seat is not shown clearly in the film so I just added a few details until it looked right; I hung a canvas bag from the back of the pilot’s seat and a few other odds and ends to busy the passenger compartment up a bit. I then cut the rear windows from their frames and glued them in place, blending them in with the rest of the airframe. The rest of the construction proceeded as normal.
After painting the airframe overall flat black I created a stencil for the plane’s identification letters by printing the appropriate code onto a sheet of low-tack Frisket Film and cutting the letters out. It was difficult to choose the appropriate size of lettering as the digital model used in the film changes perspective from scene to scene. In the end, I decided to go with a close-up shot that I could reference to several panel lines on the airframe and base the size and location of the letters on that. I’m not too concerned that the letter sizing doesn’t match in every scene; in fact, a major plot point in the movie occurs when Polly Perkins realizes that Sky Captain named his plane after her when she reads the planes ID code reflected in a pool of water. The mirror image of the ID code, h1-1-od, actually spells out yllop, not polly as seen in the water. The dashes separating the letters also disappear, this indicates that the markings are clearly made of some magical shifting paint.
Once the shark’s mouth decal had set and all the paint was dry I dirtied everything down with ground pastels, localized washes of brown paint, silver pencil crayon and regular graphite pencil.
This was a very satisfying build – the last couple of models I’ve built have been Amt/Ertl Star Wars and Star Trek kits. It was refreshing to build up a kit without having to use a dozen tubes of filler and rebuild and correct all the detail.
