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Box art


Karlj72

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Very good subject. I'm often sold on box art for aircraft kits. 

 

The main culprits are Hasegawa kits with box tops painted by a Japanese man whose name escapes me now and some of the new Airfix kits.

 

James

Edited by franky boy
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25 minutes ago, franky boy said:

Very good subject. I'm often sold on box art for aircraft kits. 

 

The main culprits are Hasegawa kits with box tops painted by a Japanese man whose name escapes me now and some of the new Airfix kits.

 

James

Shiego Koike? :hmmm:

 

Cheers :bye:

Hans J

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4 hours ago, Karlj72 said:

Just thinking about how some of the box art has inspired me to buy that certain kit,What box art inspired you to choose a certain kit?

Here's one of my favourites.

From Ron Volstad

DRAGON+6268.png?format=1500w

That Box art definitely inspired me to buy this kit. 

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I always found the 'background-less' Tamiya artwork very striking - I bought several of their armour kits in the 70s/80s...   

 

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  • 1 month later...

hi

 

Yes, I have to admit many kits in my collection were brought on the basis of the box art, when really I only had a passing interest in the subject.

 

Here is an example, not much desire to build a Sherman till this came along, brought on the boxart alone.

 

122711-10244-pristine.jpg

 

I love the older Tamiya ones of my youth. Real pullers on the pocket money those were

186441-12858-pristine.jpg

 

Tank2.jpg?v=1477699578

Maybe not technically accurate in shape or proportion but exciting enough to save up weeks of pocket money  to buy.

 

Nowadays anything by Ron Volstad like the Panther picture is sure to look good and get you wanting it, but he seems to do less and less for Dragon these days which is a pity.

I like this one so much I brought two of the kits.

DRA6320.jpg

 

 

 

Alan

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I've always thought that the box art is the main factor in many of the kits I've bought. The painted Tamiya boxes were superb and the old Hasegawa fronts were simply superlative. I would happlily put either type on my wall. 

 

One type of boxing I've always thought looked reall tacky... the Airfix boxes which had a photo of the finished model on the front, with some kind of blue-prints as a background. I remember choosing not to buy a number of kits because of the use this type of presentation. I am well aware that the contents of the various boxes are very likely to be identical, but the photographic box-fronts were just a huge turn-off. 

 

Now we often get the (fairly basic) paintings of Trumpeter and others, which are functional, but not amazing. I would assume that the more detailed a painting is, the more it costs to produce. 

 

Chris.  

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While I agree about Trumpeter's box art their new 1/16 Panther box painting is excellent. If I knew how to post pictures I'd put it on here, but Village Video doesn't seem to work any more.

😑

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23 hours ago, Bozothenutter said:

Went into the shop for a Tiger 1.....came out with Takom 505 Tiger 2

1002597-21503-98-720.jpg

Awesome box art!

That's like looking forward to a date with Jessica Alba and ending up with Jessica Biel,I can live with that lol.

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Hi,

This thread has gotten me thinking.  To be honest I can't think of a single kit off the top of my head where the box art "got me to buy it" but at the same time (especially when I was younger and built more kits) I have a strong suspicion that at some level there were probably some kits where the box "caught my intention" and as such probably did play some role in getting me buying it 😋

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I can remember walking around Beatties in Spring Gardens in Manchester as a kid and being in total awe of the Tamiya and other exotic box art.

I loved the classic Airfix 'Roy Cross' era box art too. But the big boxes in Beatties made me save up for a few of those kits.

 

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On 13/03/2019 at 00:06, Das Abteilung said:

Am I weird?  Box art never persuaded me to buy a single kit.  On the other hand, poor box art does make you wonder about the quality of what's inside the box.  There is of course no correlation.

Yes, I'm with you in that regard. My purchasing is based solely on acquiring a kit of whatever vehicle that I am currently interested in building. If there are several made by various manufacturers, then I will go by reviews. That said, I did pick up a Ryfield Models T-34/122 and a Miniart Tiran 4 at Telford that wasn't on my list, but not because of the boxart, but just because I saw them and it reminded me that I wanted them eventually. So it was a case of buy it now, otherwise, it won't be available when I want one.

 

John.

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Indeed so.  I got the RF T-34/122 too cos I really wanted it, having once made the mistake of buying the Maquette one.  Yuk.  Got a good deal from Poland with some other stuff.  Its box art does it no favours with the bottom-end view.  But I'll get their rumoured T-34/100 too if it appears.  MiniArt full-colour box art and their orange boxes are really attractive, and the contents match.  I hoovered up a bunch of Tirans, T-54s and 55s because I wanted them.  Reviews were excellent and they could have come in plain brown boxes for all I cared.

 

Plenty of nice box art with poor contents.  Artwork is relatively easy (says someone who can't draw in 2D to save his life!): accurate injection moulding very much less so (and I can't do that either.....).  And by "accurate" I don't mean whether the turret ring bolts on a King Tiger are slightly misaligned........  Plenty of nice kits with poor or unattractive box art.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I am not inspired by box-art either.  I am inspired by a subject photograph, then I think that it would look great in a particular scheme.  Alternatively, I know of a particular scheme and long await a kit of the subject on which to apply it.   As a result I have a long list of subjects with scheme notes all waiting to be built- maybe. 

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On 3/15/2019 at 2:27 AM, PF Naughton said:

Hi,

This thread has gotten me thinking.  To be honest I can't think of a single kit off the top of my head where the box art "got me to buy it" but at the same time (especially when I was younger and built more kits) I have a strong suspicion that at some level there were probably some kits where the box "caught my intention" and as such probably did play some role in getting me buying it 😋

Something similar for me. I was either already interested in the subject and the box art gave me an exiting vision of what might be possible with the kit or the box art caught my eye and drove me towards developing an interest in a kit. And it wasn't always necessarily a painting or other fictional description of a subject that spurred me on, sometimes the box simply had a photo of the completed model on the front that inspired me to try and emulate or even exceed it. This was especially the case during my early days of model making when Revell and Airfix were using this approach. Eventually this evolved into a desire to try and replicate the builds that were on display in one of my local model shops and this was the catalyst that led to my working to refine my skills, culminating in the best I ever built, around 1987, which was a 1/48 Monogram F-4C modified into an F-4B VF-111 CAG bird on a flight-deck diorama. My ATC leaders couldn't believe that I had created something like that at my young age (their words) and wanted to enter it into the regional competitions but were disallowed due to the diorama being two inches too short of the 'regulations'. :blush:

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