Reading
Swampfox' recently started build thread of the B24J "The Dragon and his tail", I noticed an attractive feature in his recounting of the build: Almost immediately, he made a "
contact sheet" of the kit he was working with.
This is a brilliant idea I thought, and prepared for a lot of work, reducing sheets to a size where you could still sort of see what they looked like, yet could not be used as a paper model.
Having recently discovered (after many years of using the programme) that Photoshop could indeed make a pdf-booklet of inumerable photos, I looked under the same heading - "Automate". Lo and behold! - it turns out that Photoshop will readily make me exactly the kind of "Contact sheet" Swampfox had made such good use of, at no extra trouble to me. Oh joy!
So here's what a contact sheet of the original 1-33 scale kit of the KK Po-2 model looks like:
And here's what the corresponding contact sheet for my 1-16 scale version of
the same kit looks like, recoloured as per the previous post:
You will note that there are a good number of larger sheets in there. These are what I've until now have called "L+", but from now on will call "L3"-sheets, which may be read as "Letter" or "Legal" width and A3 length (216 x 420 mm). I've only used these larger sheets when necessary, and divided up the rest of the parts on regular A4 sheets.
One advantage of rearranging a kit like this is that you can apply some measure of increased order among the parts, as compared to the original. In the original kit you always smell a whiff of constraint induced by printing costs, so that parts from all over sometimes are mixed up on the same sheet.
Dividing them up again, so that all engine parts are on the same A4 sheet, and all landing gear parts on another, etc., etc. is very satisfying. Doing the job also means you are forced to learn about what goes where, and there is ample of time to think about why at times, too.
The 1/16 scale kit now consists of
24 sheets,
14 A4 and
10 L3 pages. Included here is one extra A4 page containing four extra copies of the cockpit walls. I thought that might come in handy if you wish to recreate the structure of tubings, handles, pushrods and such.
The parts of the original 1/33 scale kit went into five A4 sheets, so the number of sheets really do increase exponentially as you double the scale.
Leif