1/48 Academy Su-27 Flanker

Gallery Article by Mike Grant

 

This must be a huge plane in real life, I have a 1/72 Italeri kit and it dwarfs my Fujimi MiG-29 to the same scale!  This particular model is the Academy 1/48 kit, I added the Cutting Edge cockpit set which has a beautiful resin seat.  I should have done a dry run first though, because after assembling and painting the whole unit, the two horizontal fuselage halves wouldn't go together... I had to saw and file a considerable amount of resin from the bottom of the cockpit 'tub' before the fuselage would fit together.  I also added quite a bit of detail to the undercarriage using the Verlinden 'Lock-On' book which is great reference.

 

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I used Cutting Edge's decals too, but when I came to paint the model using ModelMaster's 'Flanker' blues I decided they were much too dark.  They're probably correct matched to the full-size plane but I guess scale colour plays a part, because the photos in the Verlinden book show much less contrast between the 3 shades than the bottled paint.  I ended up mixing the 3 colours myself and toning everything down with a final overspray of light blue.  

I took some stencilling from an Aeromaster MiG-21 sheet (yes, it's all in Cyrillic!) and made some myself using the photos as reference.  I shaded the panel lines using a mix of Tamiya 'smoke' and 'clear blue', then ran blue-grey watercolour into the panel lines.  The final details were some Eduard aerials and a set of resin wheels.

Mike Grant

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Photos and text © by Mike Grant