Matt Swan keeps providing us with more modeling blessing on the 4^th installment of his instructional series. The scope of this set is water dioramas and salt chipping technique. The subject is a 1/48 Tamiya Rufe and a nice beach scene, including everything you can imagine, even scale fish in the water!

Towards the end of his 3^rd set, Matt shows how to build some simple bases to display your model. This time he goes into town showing step-by-step how to create a base, a sandy beach, foliage and more importantly: water. That is not all, as he will build a Japanese float-plane and show how to replicate paint chips using the ‘salt chipping’ technique.

Before showing how to build a diorama, Matt devotes some time to cover the tools and materials needed to build a diorama, including where you can get most of them and some comments regarding the cost of them.

This kit is listed as “My First Model Kit” and I wanted to get my grandson into modeling, so I thought this should be a good kit to introduce the hobby to my just turned 6 grandson. Well, things did not go as I had hoped. There are no age recommendations on the box, but most of the other kits on the shelf state 8 years old or older even for the snap tight kits. Now I know why. My grandson’s fine motor skills were not developed enough to handle a sprue cutter and his attention span was not long enough even to handle this kit (from start to finish no more than 2 hours). So I ended up finishing the model myself and getting him introduced to the painting and decal portion of the project. Below is listed what was done and how:

In this new offering from Casemate Publishing, authors Thomas Newdick and Tom Cooper, provide the modern aviation enthusiast with two-hundred full color aircraft drawings and forty photographs of everything flown today by squadrons around the globe. In the one hundred and ninety-two informative pages, there are some fifty-thousand words of text providing information on not just the aircraft themselves, but also on the branch of service for the country using them. The book is logically divided up by regions for the chapters, and then by countries within the regions. The opening page for each chapter shows a color line-drawing map for the region with the counties being covered within shown, making the book educational for geography as well as for the aircraft.

The chapters, as mentioned, are broken into regions as follows: