Making Model Snow – and a Sea King helicopter

 

It’s been a while since I updated this blog, so I thought I’d mark my return by fulfilling a promise I made earlier on: explaining how I made the model snow on the WW2 weekend diorama project. I used the same technique to create snow on a model helicopter display base, which is what the photos in this post show. I built the Royal Navy Sea King helicopter as a Christmas present for my brother last December, and in looking for an interesting way to display it, decided to use the snow technique again.

Click on any of these images to view a larger version.

The snow is very easy to make. I can’t take credit for the technique myself, as I simply did a Google search on how to make model snow and came across this method on several different modelling forums. You will need:

PVA glue (woodwork glue)

Baking soda

Water

All you need to do is mix the three together. I found that mixing the PVA with just a little water enabled me to judge the quantity I was making, then adding the baking soda afterwards turned the gloopy diluted PVA into a thicker and brighter white mixture. The thickness of mixture that you create will determine what kind of snow effect you end up with: for this display base, and for the WW2 diorama I made earlier on, I used a fairly thick mixture which when dry gave the effect of areas of half-melted snow. Once you have your mixture (I mixed it up in a small cat food tin), it can be applied with anything that comes to hand – I used a small strip of card. On the helicopter display base, I used some thinned black paint and Tamiya weathering powers to suggest areas of ‘dirty’ snow, where people’s feet, vehicle wheels and a few oil or diesel spills have discoloured the snow and made it look dirty.

 

The based itself is simply a round chopping board, available fairly cheaply from many shops, covered with a piece of fine wet & dry sandpaper cut to size to represent tarmac. I applied the snow onto this, weathered it as described above, then secured the helicopter to the base. It is not based on any real location, but is supposed to represent a dispersal somewhere around Stanley in the Falkland Islands.

The helicopter kit used here is the old Airfix Sea King AEW Mk2 kit, which is supposed to represent a submarine hunter complete with a large radome built onto the starboard side. I didn’t want to make mine a sub-hunter, as the one my brother had flown in was a regular RAF chopper, so I didn’t add the radome or other anti-sub gubbins. The kit itself is really showing its age and posed a number of problems during construction: the fuselage halves fitted together rather poorly, requiring a lot of filler to smooth out the gaps, and the cockpit glazing and nose area didn’t fit together well either, so more filler was needed there. Also, kit manufacturing was not very advanced back when this kit was designed, so the complex nose windows have over-thick frames and are therefore the wrong shape. Following other people’s lead, I helped to disguise the incorrect nose windows by adding painted-on black surrounds to the windows, giving the illusion of larger windows with fine frames.

 

The overhead cockpit windows were tinted green with translucent paint, representing the tinted windows on the real craft, and with the windows masked off using masking fluid, the whole model was given a coat of grey paint to match Navy Sea Kings of the early 1990s. I must say that the masking fluid did not work well, requiring quite a lot of touching in after I finally managed to remove it from the glazing. I will need to find a better solution for future projects. After final painting and a coat of Johnson Klear floor wax to seal the decals and add a slight sheen, I used Tamiya weathering powders to add some subtle staining and grime to the Sea King. Also, many photos of real Sea Kings I managed to find showed that when parked, they tend to have large removable red plugs in the engine air intakes and exhaust, so I made some from scrap plastic, painted them red and attached them to the model.