Those of you who have been following the "New Models for 2020" thread will know I have, at the instigation of Piotr Tendera (who is manufacturing our rocket motors), been designing a new model:
Above: the TSK Iskra is a lovely little Polish jet trainer. This is a particularly colourful version that took Piotr's fancy.
A quick search on the Internet resulted in a usable '3-view':
prints of which I cut out to form the basis of a template for the model:
I enlarged the tailplane and fin by about 15% (not sure if this was necessary, but old habits are hard to give up!).
I checked the red colour against several photos (again from the Internet) and got to work with the rather nice livery:
I work in
Paint Shop Pro 9, which is not ideal, but it's what I'm used to. Starting with the fin, the decoration is slowly built up a few pixels at a time. Piotr specifically asked for the number '13' on the fin.
After a couple days of hard work (thank goodness for the 'undo' function!) I was quite pleased with the result:
The other side was easy to do (think 'mirror function' of the software). Some of the fine detail I copied from the rather fine cardboard model out there, and I decided against too many panel lines, etc. I then printed out both templates on thin card, cut out all the bits, and checked everything fitted together:
Which they did, apart from a few tweaks here and there.
So next up is a proper balsa prototype.
More later .....