1/48 Great Wall Hobby P-61A Black Widow

Gallery Article by Cameron Corless on Nov 26 2015

 

      

Highly detailed kit. Very fun to build. I wish more kits came with this much detail.

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For this build I built Great Wall Hobby's Northrop P-61A "Black Widow." The kit came with several detail additions. My original plan was to purchase the Revel kit with several photo etch and resin details. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the stock Great Wall Hobby without the need for any add-ons. The build went smoothly, but the kit is definitely for expert modelers only.

The funnest part of the whole build was the weathering. I chose to do a modified hair spray technique. I painted the model Alclad first. After that I protected it with Future Floor Polish. I then sprayed most of the plane with hair spray. After that set I painted the plane with acrylic flat black paint. Once the paint dried I sprayed the plane with water. I then let the water soak in. Next was the scraping. I used a toothpick to chip paint in exposed areas from front to back. This worked alright but I wanted to create a worn out look. I thinned some Testor's acrylic paint cleaner and grabbed a stiff brush. I worked that solution into the high traffic areas. It would then gradually remove some of the paint showing the Alclad below. This created a rubbed off effect. After that I created a grey wash for the panel lines. Last was to spray on the exhaust streaks.

View full build at
this link.

Cameron Corless

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Photos and text © by Cameron Corless