Philippine Army Air Corps P-26 Peashooter (part 01)

Although my blog is focused on Luft'46 designs, I've decided to veer off a bit.  I chose to make not only a non-luft'46 concept, but an Allied one at that!

I've decided to make a model of an aircraft served my country in WW2 -- the P-26 Peashooter!

I'll be targetting a scale of 1:72 instead of my usual 1:48.

Framework

After a little bit of googling, I found a suitable 3-view diagram.  I converted the diagram into a 'skeleton' on which I will build my model on:

Low Poly Model

First, I make the low-poly fuselage:

The goal here is to keep the shapes as simple as possible.  Hence, you'll notice that I did not include the rudder, headrest nor the engine.  Think of it as modeling using playdough.

Next, I do the headrest:

Just in case you're curious, here's how the headrest looks like without the fuselage:

Later on, I'll be performing some boolean operations between the fuselage and headrest to cut out the unneeded faces.

Next, I do the wings and the rudder like so:

Then the stabilizers and engine:

Landing gear spats and the engine cowling:

And finally the various doodads like the wheels, props, visors and antenna:

Here's a quick picture of the parts before being put together:

When you put them all together, you'll get this:

In my next update, I'll convert the low poly model into a wireframe.  Once I get the wireframe, I'll do some simplifications to make the model 'card-friendly'.