Model Art Magazine is a monthly magazine that covers aircraft, armor, ships and car modeling. Model Art started releasing magazines in 1966 and has evolved from there over the past forty-six years. They also release many special releases during the year, as is the case of this issue.

This issue covers IJN Heavy Cruisers that were produced from 1922 - 1945. During this time period there were eighteen heavy cruisers built and these fell into six different classes. The classes being the Furutaka, Aoba, Myoko, Takao, Mogami and Tone.

The magazine is broken down into nine sections. Section one covers all eighteen of these cruisers. There are thirty-six pages devoted to them with black and white period photos and line drawings showing the updates and changes that took place through the cruisers life.

Section two covers the armament found on these vessels. The armament ranges from the main guns to the anti-aircraft guns and also includes torpedoes, radar arrays and speakers. Each of these includes a black and white period photo, line drawing and a photo(s) of what is available to modelers.

Section three covers the heavy cruiser Takao. The magazine uses period b&w photos and line drawings to illustrate some of the changes that had been made from 1932 - 1937. There is also a reference using line drawings to show the optic weapons and fire control system on the Takao.

Section four is 1/350 scale examples of the bridges from these ships. These are nice color photographs that show a great amount of detail that modelers can use for reference.

Sections five through nine cover modeling the IJN Heavy Cruisers in 1/700 scale. Naturally this starts off with the available kits in 1/700 scale. Next up is a tips and tricks section on how to “accurize” your models. These tips are all shown in full color photographs. Following this is a section on the "Takao" class heavy cruiser. The remaining sections are full builds of the Kumano, Mogami, Suzuya modify and Chikuma.

Even though Model Art is mainly printed in Japanese, I still find it to be a very valuable resource. For those that are more technologically advanced there are apps that will translate Japanese to English. I use one of these and it really helps to understand the articles. I recommend Model Art to modelers as another publication that you can pull information from.

I would like to thank Model Art and IPMS/USA for the opportunity to review this magazine.