1/72 Italeri A-6E Intruder  

by Patrick Vossenberg

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Here are a few pics from my recently completed Italeri A-6E in 1/72 - done out of the box. A very nice kit with a good level of detail overall: raised cockpit detail, nice ejection seats, nice landing gears / wheels, recessed panel lines and engraved detail on the airframe.  A wing-fold option is included in the kit, and I believe there is an Eduard set out there that you could use to even further enhance the wing-folds. I encountered no major fit or construction problems during the build.

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With this kit I wanted to really get a realistic paint job of a used Intruder, so I used several ways to achieve that: pre-shading of panel lines, panel fading, post shading of specific areas, panel line washes and careful drybrushing of raised detail. Basic painting was done with enamels (Humbrol), acrylic gloss paint (Tamiya) was used to protect the enamel base colours. Once this was dry, panel line washes were done again with enamels (Model Master), heavily thinned with White Spirit. The advantage of using enamels is that you can easily let this dry overnight and still remove the excess wash - because of the acrylic layer underneath. The colour scheme is standard two-tone grey. Final flat coat was done with Gunze acrylic, which was the first time I used this.  It gave a nice dull finish bringing out the variations in the grey tones very subtly. Decals are from the kit and are typical for Italeri: sharply printed, very thin and very flexible in settling down - they worked great with a bit of setting solution. I choose to do the Marines version as I found that the black markings suited the greys.

A nice little kit indeed - and I am quite happy with the way it turned out!

Regards to all fellow modellers out there and thumbs up to the ARC team - I picked up a great deal of tips and tools from here!

Patrick

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Photos and text © by Patrick Vossenberg