1/72 Italeri F-16C

Gallery Article by Erickson Ong on Dec 2 2003

 

Well this is my first time to post in ARC and finally after long sleepless nights of thinking, I finally had to courage to post my work here in ARC. This is my second work an F-16C from Italeri which is a very terrible kit starting out from the quality of the seat shown below …it was horrible!  I had to scratchbuild the whole cockpit esp the ejection seat since here in the Philippines I have no knowledge of any detailed sets of cockpits being sold. The kit started out as an unpainted plane since a few years ago whenever I bought a kit I just glued it all together…now grown up I decided to take it all off apart and remodel it. The whole building of the kit didn’t go well since while in the middle of painting the whole model it slipped off my hand and fell to the floor the right wing broke apart as well as the left elevator little did I know that the canopy also cracked since it was masked off and I didn’t know that it got damaged after I finished making the whole model and I was totally disappointed after seeing the end result of my model…..but luckily I went to the hobby store and found an Academy F-16A that sold for only 2.5 US dollars (which I think represented the early prototype version shown below) and used the canopy to replace the damaged one in my F-16. By the way the Academy kit that I bought was poor in every detail and what would you expect from a 2.5 US dollar kit. Oh well I plan on making it an F-2 fighter of the Japanese Air Force.

 

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I started out of course with the cockpit and painted it all off with I think Gunze H68 dark gray and medium gray and used Gunze flat in order to tone the camo scheme and look like a bit gunship since I cant find a gunship color in my hobby store. Oh the decals that I used doesn’t represent any real aircraft of this version since the squadron markings that I used uses two seater F-16s but I just like it that way and for me if a model looks like the real thing..it's fine with me.  

After painting everything, I used brown poster paint mixed with Elmers white glue to detail the panel lines which I think got too light after the final flat coat I applied but I think it went ok. And lastly the markings for the refueling part was painted on since the decal that I used once was lost after I reassembled the whole kit. 

Well after it took me around 2 months to finish this jinx aircraft =) I was happy with the final result. Shown below was my first model an F-15E prototype that is used automotive gray acrylic paint for the gunship type finish which I’ll submit some other time. Hmmm…plan on building a Rafaele!!

Erickson Ong

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Photos and text © by Erickson Ong