Ooh, the horror! Chibi planes! (But I like them anyway!)

 Hi,

It’s been a crazy time and they still are weird and crazy. Like almost everyone I suffer from moodswings and periods with an utter lack of creativity, although I have plenty of time on my hands for creative stuff. Lockdown and limited people in my life someties make me a moody person. So, whilst desperately in need of some mindful filling of time, some quality building but not interested enough to pick up the SRB, I rummaged through my files for a quick and pleasing short-term inbetweenie. And while I usually aren’t really into chibi stuff, I decided to make Propeller Factory’s funny design of the fictitious Savoia S.21 seaplane flown by pig-faced Marco ‘Porco Rosso’ Pagot (or Rossolini if you will) in the Studio Ghibli anime of the same name, designed by Kamome. 

It was a fun build, thanks to Google Translate. I hardly made any photos during the build, it wasn’t meant as a build report anyway. It is always nice to have a new approach to how to create curved sections and seaplane hulls, especially when the fit is good and the result looks the part.
For the propeller I skipped the kit’s version and used Leiff Ohlson’s articulated wooden propeller because it has more of the right shape. And it looks great.
It didn’t take very long until the pane was finished and stood on its little pedestal i made from a small wooden nut serving cup turned upside down with an added ‘sea surface’ with transparent acrylic paste.

I watched the film afterwards, and it was enjoyable. It was, as I expected, a little shallow but absolutely entertaining and very well drawn. With anime, I usually prefer the english dubbed versions because I find the voice acting in Japanese, although original, always a little too hysterical for my taste*. Sorry, purists! 

But wait, there's more!

After the break I'll show you what.

* exception to the rule is of course the masterpiece anime Akira.

The day after the Savoia S21 was built and I saw the film, I decided to also build the Curtiss seaplane, which also was in the Propeller Factory’s chibi arsenal. This one I documented a little more, so enjoy a couple of my build pictures and the end result.

The rim around the cockpit was cut on the lines and curved inward to give it the impression of a cushioned leather rim.

The engine. A sewing pin, encased in a tightly rolled paper cylinder, with a tiny bead CA'ed at both ends as a cap, providing a good rotation. The result was shoved into the fuselage.

Note the slight gullwing-shape of the upper wing.

In the translated text I figured out Kamome had trouble with the framework of the floats but I didn’t have any, using CA glue for a quick set and using sewing pins as an inner reinforcement. And perhaps the slightly reduced scale (1/57 to 1/72) also worked better. The floats themselves were almost completely edge-glued, here and there also with CA for a quick set result. The horizontal struts had thin bamboo strips cut from a cocktail stick as reinforcement.

A little vague, but note the metallic knobs of the seweing pin tops sticking out of the vertical struts of the floats.

 

I more or less intentionally left off the machine guns. Here too one of Leiff Ohlson’s props was used.
And the Curtiss also was placed on a watery micro diorama ex-nut cup pedestal.

The last one is of the both of them together.

Let the fight begin!

 

The pedestal scenery if you will is just a tiny circle of blue paper on which I added some darker blue blots with markers to greate some kind of under water lighting effect and glued them to the wooden cups. Then I used some acrylic transparent paste to create a little choppy water surface, the Savoia even with some wake waves from take-off:

Here the paste still is wet, but when dried it is transparent and gives clear realistic waves.

Well, that was fun. And now, hopefully, on to the last part of the Shuttle stack build!
See you soon!

--PK