Bolt Action! Flyers, Pt.1: the Spitfire
Another Bolt Action Post! If you love modeling and haven’t played this great game, read on! Today it’s all about the famous Spitmarine!
As i have said before in previous Bolt Action Posts, airplanes have a similar role to Orbital Bombardement in 40K. The bombers are just there and they rain down fire on the enemy. But in Bolt Action you can easily model a plane for that, and although it has no actual standing as an active model, it does liven up the air attack phase quite nicely. Starting today, I will show you all three airplanes I have built for different Bolt Action armies and learn something along the way about it’s history.
Today: the Spitfire!
I picked up this box set from Airfix: 1:72 aifrcaft of the aces.
It comes with three planes: a Messerschmitt BF109, a P51 Mustang and the Supermarine Spitfire in an early rendition, the MK1a. It cost me about 30 bucks and came with paints, surprisingly good quality actually and with good colors and with a few brushes.
Anyway, for my desert army I painted the Spitfire up in desert camo. Here’s the camo (but not color) pattern I copied:
And here’s the model I finished. I tried to make him look a bit weathered as well:
Of course the Airfix kit doesn’t have the correct decals for the Northern Africa campaign and since the model will not really play a role in the game and is more for good looks, I decided not to follow through and purchase correct decals. Interesting to note is that in a lot of WW2 images, the Spits in the desert didn’t have letter markings on the bodies, like above and below:
Here’s a desert pattern from Eduard, that does include letters, but blue ones, outlined with white.
You can see that the color scheme in the original color picture and the one above is more yellow, but the one below has more muted colors and that is what I went for in my model, since that fits better with the troops.
I based the model on a long, 14 inch bamboo skewer, with a resin 60mm base. It’s very stable and it’s height makes it look great with 28mm models.
The airfix kit comes with the blue paint needed for the bottom and in my collection of Games Workshop paints, I could not find the right one; i was glad for the little mini cup of blueish paint!
And here are my palettes, just like everyone elses I presume! Trying to find the right colors takes some time.
Next week: the P51 Mustang!
SC Mike
