Saturday, September 26, 2015

Building Airfix's "Santa Maria"

This has been a project that almost thirty years in the making. As I noted elsewhere in this blog, the small 1/384 Airfix "Santa Maria" was the model that started my interest in not only building miniatures, but studying, and later drawing and painting, them. It took a little longer than anticipated to build, but I believe the end results are worth it. 

A couple of items to note.
There is really not a lot of reference material on either version of Gullen y Tato's interpretation of the venerable ship, in this guise a caravela redonda. I believe the only two kits that properly convey this interpretation are the Heller 1/75 scale model, and the now rather expensive 1/60 Imai model. Lacking either of these, I had to rely on what photographs and information was available to me. One reference was an article in the October 1932 edition of "Popular Mechanics". Other references were in images scattered around the Internet. In the end, the model shares the hull colors of the 1957 replica with the rigging of the 1926 version. 
Here is a link to the Picasa album with images and text to explain the process of building the model. One thing is for certain, it is a far better looking model now than as if it had been built straight from the kit. 

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