'Airfix Project'

In all honesty this little project started by accident. While I was in the process of the 2026 30x30 Direct Watercolour Challenge (insert link here) I was doing a series of beach paintings. One of them showed an old SRN4 cross channel hovercraft taking on board passengers at Pegwell Bay, Margate.

1 - SRN4 Hovercraft at Pegwell Bay

The one I painted had the Hoverlloyd livery and it suddenly struck me what it reminded me of. The Roy Cross artwork on the box lid of the Airfix model of the same. It isn’t a copy of the box art, I hasten to add, and if you put the two of them alongside each other you’d see mine for what it is, the work of an enthusiastic amateur, and no better than that.

When I was a kid, from about the age of 7 up to when I did my O Levels I was quite an avid Airfix modeller. I was also happy enough to make kits from Tamiya, Revell or Frog, but Airfix were my favourite. Over the years I spent a great deal of money buying Airfix models from Brayley’s model shop (well, it was only a great deal of money proportionately. I didn’t get a lot of pocket money, and even supplemented by paper round money and milk round money it really didn’t go that far. But what I did get, I spent a lot of on Airfix.) But for all that, there were a number of kits I never bought for reasons of cost, or whatever. The SRN4 is a good example of this.

I knew that Airfix changed hands over the years but didn’t know they still existed until about 5 years ago. Intrigued, I bought an Aston Martin DB5 starter kit. And I just didn’t get on with it. The glue and the paint it came with were not the best, that’s true, but I just didn’t enjoy it any more. So even though I could now afford to buy the modern SRN4 kit – and others that I missed out on that I would have liked to build, I don’t want to now.

However, a seed had been duly planted. One of the things that made Airfix kits more appealing to me than their competitors’ was always the art on the box lid. So why not make paintings of the subjects of the kits that ‘got away’, that I never built back in the day, but I wish that I had? I already had the SRN4 painting. And straight after the SRN4 I had made this direct watercolour painting of a type B bus.

2) Type B London Bus

 

This was the first really successful motorised bus, certainly to be used on the streets of London. It was a larger kit than I used to buy. The type B had not long come into service before ethe outbreak of World War 1 and many were requisitioned to take troops to the front during the war. Airfix also made a kit of the troop transport version, but I was always more interested in the London version.

3 – Short Skyvan

Another larger kit. This rather ungainly looking transport plane was used by a number of different airlines for short haul duties. The Airfix box lid showed it in the livery of Olympic Airlines, and I did see a couple of these in that livery when I first went island hopping among the Greek islands in 1982. I really enjoyed painting this one for the happy memories it brough back of good times. I never flew on one, I hasten to add. I used ferries.

4 – Fairey Rotodyne 

Was it a helicopter? Was it an autogyro? Was it an airplane? Well, actually it was none of these. The official description of it is that it was a compound gyroplane, and it was just one example of a number of what-might’ve-beens of post war British Civil Aviation.

The rotors were powered by tip jets – literally jets on the tips of the rotors – which would be used during take off and landing. During level flight the rotors ran free, like the rotors of an autogyro, and the machine was powered by the engines mounted on the stubby wings.

On paper, this certainly looked like a good idea and the one prototype that was built performed well in trials which began in 1957. But there were concerns about the noise generated by the rotors and firm orders from commercial airlines failed to materialise. The project had been funded by the British Government and they ended this in 1962. The prototype was dismantled, although pieces of it are on display in the helicopter museum.

I painted this using my new Daler-Rowney watercolour set.

5 – Bristol Superfreighter

The Superfreighter itself was first made in 1953 and it was used essentially for cross channel air services. Sir Freddie Laker, the budget airline pioneer, got his start in the aviation industry with his airline Channel Air Bridge which used Superfreighters at first, before using larger Carvairs, a plane made essentially from a converted Douglas DC4.

I’m not really sure what might have prompted Airfix to model this plane, but I’m pretty glad that they did.