1/144th scale Bristol Blenheims

After mentioning at a recent WW2 desert game that I could do with some more British desert aircraft,  my pal Pete very kindly printed off two Blenheim Mark 1s! I've got loads of desert fighters but I wanted something more appropriate for the bomber role than the European coloured B25s and Beaufort I occasionally press into service alongside my sand coloured B26.   

And here they both are, painted up in two different Mediterranean schemes. They are single piece resin prints so no assembly at all required (unlike the BPM planes which come as two halves and usually with separate engines etc too). They just had a few bits of flash around the wings to clean up but nothing major.

Here they are 'in progress' as I'm adding the topcoats over the grey primer layer. The STLs have very pronounced engraved panel lines, which is fine, but I know some people hate these and spend ages filling them in. Although exaggerated panel lines are popular in some parts of the modelling community, irl they are very fine and hard to see and I prefer a plain aircraft. I just painted over them and I'm not going to make any effort to shade them as they still stand out.  

This one is in a proper desert scheme based on my 'British Aircraft of WW2' and the Airfix Guide to RAF Camouflage. It is Dark Earth with the Dark Green disruptive replaced with Light Stone. I actually found this very hard to paint as I perhaps foolishly did the undercoat as sand, so had to fill in the brown in reverse. For RAF planes I usually do the Dark earth coat first, and it felt very counterintuitive.  

In principle it should have Sky Blue undersides, but the colour plate for this particular squadron showed light grey, so I did the underside grey instead.

You can see where I've got a bit too much Dark Earth in the official scheme, but it isn't hugely noticeable. The decals are mainly my I-94 RAF decals, but I had some Zvezda fuselage markings left so I used those for the squadron markings. 

The moulded panel lines came in very handy for lining up the decals as well as the dividing line between the upper and lower surfaces paint schemes, so perhaps they have some use after all. 

Here they are flying across the dining table. I've largely given up on wire stands as they are just too unstable outside solo play, and have instead adopted these rather useful acrylic cups. I still need to add some magnabase strips to the cups to hold SP markers.

I did the other Blenheim as a squadron based in Palestine (84 Squadron I think?). This had the standard green/brown disruptive but sky blue undersides. I was vaguely tempted to do the 1940 black underside bomber scheme, but that was uncommon in the Mediterranean for these aircraft types. I can use it in France 1940 as well if required as it is green/brown alongside my long suffering Fairey Battle.

I'm very pleased with those, yes they are very much Mark 1s but I'm not overly fussed about using the right versions in the right years. They will work for lots of theatres early war, and later war I've got my RAF B25s/B26s and my recently discovered Mosquito (found alongside the Gladiator I'd completely forgotten about).