Hey folks,
I hope you’re all keeping well! After the excitement of last week’s news—being the announcement that the final part of the Blood of Kings trilogy, The Demon Hunter, is coming out on 11 July if you missed it!—I’m back to another Plastic, Paint, and Glue post, while I recharge the storage tank of writing related stuff!
This week is another interesting one (although I suppose they’re all interesting, to me at least, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing them!), a Spitfire MkVb that would have seen service in the Malta theatre of operations during the Siege of Malta (the second one!), specifically the period within it over the summer of 1942.
What makes Siege of Malta Spitfires of interest is the array of colour schemes that were used – far more variety, much different to those used in other theatres, and often unique to this battle.
The first Spitfires arriving to the island were painted in the desert colours of light and dark brown (Middlestone and Dark Earth to be precise!), which was quickly determined to be wholly unsuitable for operations which were carried out largely over the sea. A number of new colour schemes were devised and tried out over the summer of 1942, with each batch of Spitfires being delivered under heavy fire to the island getting a different livery (for the most part!)
Considering the ferocious nature of the battle in the skies, exact records of the colours used were not kept, which has led to a huge amount of research, conjecture, and speculation in the modelling community. Both the heroic story of the island’s air defence and the array of aircraft colour schemes used really attracted me to this period and locale of World War II, and this is the first of what I hope to be an example of each colour scheme I’ve encountered, both confirmed, and in some cases speculative (because I think they look great!).
This plane is from Operation Salient, which delivered Spitfires to the island around 9 June 1942. This scheme is a little more on the speculative end of the spectrum, although I think it reasonable to believe this, or something very similar was used.
It’s a respray of Dark Mediterranean Blue over the Desert Camouflage, when they were running low on paint, so the original colours can be just about made out underneath. From a painting point of view, I think I went one coat of blue too many on this one, but in real life you can still make out the colours underneath quite clearly. It’s a little harder in the photo! I also went a bit heavier on the weathering than I usually do, to reflect the dusty environment and the heavy use the planes were getting. Not sure how I feel about the level I took it too, as I usually prefer a lighter use finish.
On to the pictures!
I hope you like this one. The research around the planes used in this battle has been really fascinating, and was something I knew very little about before.
I’m hoping to come up with another writing based topic to chat about and mix up the content of my posting a bit going forward, but haven’t had any ideas yet! I’m sure I’ll come up with something, but if there’s anything you folks would like to know, I’m always open to suggestions!
Until next Monday!