February's stash additions

I'm a bit behind with my blogging as work is a bit hectic at the moment. I really meant to post up my recent purchases a week or so ago as I'm quite please with this month's haul. I finally managed to get a bit of time to myself so here we go...

First the stash additions. I'm starting to cut back on buying kits as I have such a cue of projects that adding to it would just be silly. That said, I couldn't resist these 1/144 Revell Micro-Wings models as they are still on offer at my local store - just £1 each!

I'm finding these little kits excellent testbeds for trying out new techniques before I roll them out on proper projects. As my interest at the moment is RAF camouflage schemes and how to a paint them, these WW2 British fighters will be really handy (although the Hurricane is destined for either a Soviet of Finnish paint scheme).

And as I'm doing a few RAF schemes I thought it would be nice to buy a suitable paint set...

These Hataka (made in Poland) sets are new on the market and I really liked the idea of getting all the paints I needed in one handy little box. There are six paints that allow you to do RAF camo schemes for both early and late war.

All this is in aid of my working up to tackling the lovely Airfix 1/72 Tomahawk IIB that I got for Christmas. The Airfix Tomahawk is a RAF Desert Airforce machine and unfortunately Hataka don't make a set for doing RAF desert schemes yet, but I want to practise airbrushing disruptive pattern camouflage. To help me research my Tomahawk I did buy Osprey's fascinating 'Tomahawk and Kittyhawk Aces of the RAF and Commonwealth'.

It's an excellent history of the Curtis P-40 fighter in RAF service and has some wonderful detail about the machines and their colour schemes.

This is all a bit of a big diversion from my Finnish Continuation War project but I am reading Derek Robinson's 'A Good Clean Fight' - which is in part about the Desert Airforce Tomahawks - and I'm really caught up in the theme at the moment. But I did buy some material intended to help me with my Finnish Army model making...

'The Weathering Magazine' covers one of my favourite weathering themes - rust. I really like painting beat-up and war weary vehicles and want to improve my skills in this area.

This magazine is largely based on the work by the legendary Mig Jimenez and features many of his own range of products, but the techniques are just as valid for most makes of weathering paints, powders and washes.

The photography is stunning and to be honest it is weathering porn!

I don't intend to subscribe to this mag on a regular basis but rather pick up those editions that are most relevant to the sort of weathering techniques that I am most interested in. Next month I will probably buy their issue about mud.

Unfortunately having looked through this magazine a couple of times I'm now desperate to try out some of the ideas so this may end up with me starting a brand new project just to go mad with the rust! (I'm so easily distracted!)

Anyway, the last of this months purchases was a sheet of dry transfer lettering by Woodland Scenics. It's a selection of gothic san-serif numerals in yellow and is intended for the numbers on my Finnish tanks. I believe these number transfers are really intended for scale model trains but they are ideal for my Finnish armoured company (especially as there is a real lack of specialist 1/72 Finnish WW2 armour decals on the market).

The sizes range from just a millimetre high to about 7.5mm tall and the weight of the font is akin to Helvetica Medium. They aren't perfect for my intended use - the actual Finnish tank numbers being somewhat more condensed (narrower) - but this is the best I could find.

It's £6 a sheet, which isn't exactly cheap, but then I will get rather a lot of tanks out of this with a great deal to spare! Next month I will probably buy the white letter version to go with this as my Finnish armour has white serial numbers too.

Correction: Typical! Hataka have just released an RAF African Campaign paint set. Ah well, too late now I have bought the closest Vallejo paint equivalents now. Still, for your reference...