Sukhoi Su-27 "Flanker"

by Mike Grant

Academy's 1/48 scale Flanker is available online from Squadron

This must be a huge plane in real life. I have the 1/72 Italeri kit and it dwarfs my Fujimi MiG-29 to the same scale!

This particular model is the Academy 1/48 kit. I added the Cutting Edge cockpit set which has a beautiful resin seat. I should have done a dry run first though, because after assembling and painting the whole unit, the two horizontal fuselage halves wouldn't go together. I had to saw and file a considerable amount of resin from the bottom of the cockpit 'tub' before the fuselage would fit together. You'd think after 30 years of modelling I'd have learned the 'measure twice, cut once' principle.

I also added quite a bit of detail to the undercarriage using the Verlinden 'Lock-On' book which is great reference.

I used Cutting Edge's decals too which went down superbly, but when I came to paint the model using ModelMaster's 'Flanker' blues I decided they were much too dark. They're probably correct matched to the full-size plane but I guess scale colour plays a part, because the photos in the Verlinden book show much less contrast between the 3 shades than the bottled paint. I ended up mixing the 3 colours myself and toning everything down with a final overspray of light blue. I took some stencilling from an Aeromaster MiG-21 sheet (yes, it's all in Cyrillic!) and made some myself using the photos as reference. I shaded the panel lines using a mix of Tamiya 'smoke' and 'clear blue', then ran blue-grey watercolour into the panel lines.

The final details were some Eduard aerials and a set of resin wheels.

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2002 by Mike Grant
Page Created 28 February, 2002
Last Updated 28 February, 2002

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