I always like to add figures to my builds to obtain a sense of scale. ICM has provided some of the best figures in plastic for some time. Their latest release is aimed at Father Winter and the German Luftwaffe.

They come packaged in a sturdy cardboard box with a beautiful painting of the figures on the front of the box top. A single sprue of light tan plastic is packed in a re-sealable plastic bag. Five figures and various components of a German airfield are included on the sprue. I could find no flash, and the faces, which are the basis of a good figure, are beautifully rendered.

Plusmodel’s Aero Line continues its tradition of providing the modeler with simple and interesting pilot figures. The latest is a pilot for the MiG-15. This is a two-piece figure. The biggest part is the pilot himself. The other piece is the parachute pack. Both are perfectly cast in light grey resin. There is very little clean-up required. The thin wafer of material around the figure is easily removed by hand and cleaned up with a sharp blade. The face is perfectly formed. The proportion of the figure are perfect. The stance of the pilot is relaxed and completely natural. The equipment is perfectly sculpted, as well. I could not find anything I didn’t like. The small parachute pack is easily attached to the pilot’s backside.

The figure is safely packaged in a plastic container with the parts safeguarded by a piece of foam. Included on the packaging is a painting of the figure. Inside the packaging is the same painting but much larger.

The Kit

The kit is cleanly molded in 154 pieces of multi-colored plastic. These parts are the same parts used in constructing many of the other 1/72 offerings from MiniArt. No flash is apparent and detail is very crisp on all parts. A new part that I have not seen on this model was the introduction of a stone foundation.

Construction

Assembly of this kit was straight forward as all of the offerings before it. However, I took a different approach. On many of the other kits, I found that doing each wall with the end connectors tended to produce minor gaps at the corners. This time I decided to pre-build the corner assemblies and then add the walls. Also, I decided to paint parts separately before assembly. This approach offered a much cleaner look to the house, a departure from the worn down structures I had built in the past. The result was by far my favorite work of all of these kits I had done.

I remember when The Munsters were first introduced to us. Just your typical all-American family, who came from Transylvania, and who also just happened to be Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein! The rest of the family had Count Dracula as the slightly off-kilter Grandpa; a prepubescent wolf boy named Eddie who slept in a cupboard; and one out-of-place niece, the beautiful Marilyn. The house they lived in was an amazing place of dungeons, secret passages, and cob webs galore. The architecture was mostly Gothic, with hints of Victorian included, and a little Haunted House thrown in for good measure!

Once again, I’ve chosen MiniArt’s 1/35 diorama series for my conversion project. Like the other kits in this line, the walls and base are thin vacuformed styrene. The air ductwork is also vacuformed in halves, like the walls. This requires a lot of putty-work to clean up the gaps as usual, so I do not recommend this kit to beginner modelers. However, despite the extra modeling work required for these kits, the results can be very rewarding. I used half a tube of Squadron Green Putty on this kit, and the putty and sanding took longer on the ductwork than the walls.