Hasegawa 1/72 Spitfire Mk VIII as MT841, RIAF "Pauline" Nose Art

[Madmaks]

I have not seen many spitfires with nose art and have been fascinated by MT841 for a while for its excellent nose art and that too on a RIAF Spitfire! Using the book Spitfires in the Sun and the site bharat-rakshak.com as starting reference points, I found some excellent decals for MT841 from Exito Decals and started of on building the kit. According to the reference material cited earlier MT841 Spitfire was with No.2 Sqn  RIAF from 20 Jan 46, and was written off on 29th Jan 1947, when P/O Pat Callaghan belly landed the aircraft at Kohat airfield. The aircraft engine had caught fire after an oil leak in circuit.

 

The Hasegawa kit is a quick build with well fitting parts. It has a basic cockpit, good exterior detail and engraved panel lines. Some have discussed that the kit's outline is a tad off from the real airplane as with Hasegawa's 1/48 scale but frankly I could not tell for this or for that matter - the 1/48 I built earlier. I really enjoyed building this kit. The only mods made were seat belts made from masking tape. Paints are all Tamiya. I started with spraying Tamiya Titanium Silver as a primer. Next step was some salt weathering added to the left wing root before pre-shading with Tamiya nato Black. I then sprayed the standard RAF camo scheme in Medium Sea Grey, Dark Green and Dark Earth. The prop cone was a little challenging to paint and required creativity. Once dry, I scrapped off the salt and added some light chipping around heavy traffic areas (cockpit, cowl...etc) using a metallic silver color pencil. Decals were added and sealed with Tamiya clear gloss and then I applied a black panel line wash using Tamiya's line of washes. I sealed it all with Tamiya flat clear.

 

I do hope you enjoy the pictures. Some were taken indoors - some outdoors but my photography skills leave a lot to be desired so apologies for that. Comments/ questions/suggestions are always very welcome as they help me get better! 

 

To start, a picture of the actual aircraft:

 

 

The Decal sheet came with poster art which is excellent!

 

 

 

 

And a few outdoor pictures in natural light

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for looking!

Edited November 8, 2019 by Madmaks