The "box scale" 1/426 USS Pine Island (AV-12) seaplane tender ship kit comes with this ultra adorable Martin PBM Mariner. It was satisfyingly easy to construct, but definitely took a careful hand to paint and decal!
I built this as a gift for a friend who served on the AV-13 Salisbury Sound during the Korean War. Sadly only a single PBM survives today, but it's fully restored at the USN museum at Pensacola, FL.
Really loving the new lighting I installed on my Alta California Railway model railroad. It really adds so much to the entire scene.
While I was in Industrial Design school in the mid 2010s I loved doing drawings from random prompts. One of my favorite I ever did was my own design for a 1970s era cabover semi truck. the challenge was to design it using the parts and limitations in manufacturing of the era, so you can see the square sealed beam headlights, riveted roof and plenty of chrome plating. I'd just recently learned the old illustration trick, known as "desert chrome" shading, and what object could possibly be better than a semi truck to show that off?
"VULCAN" is my own brand name for a heavy equipment manufacturer similar to International Harvester. Looking at this drawing now makes me want to draw some more of these.
What should I draw next?
This is the first locomotive portrait I ever took. My mom handed me her film camera on the platform of the Amtrak station at Anaheim, CA at age 5.
Southern Pacific 6347 is an EMD GP35R rebuilt by SP to be more reliable and eek out a few more years of service, IIRC it was sold off after the merger and ended up as a WATCO engine.
Ironically it would also be the only pre-UP merger Espee portrait I'd ever take. We were taking the San Joaquin to move north to the Bay Area, and the town we settled in was on a former WP mainline and for some reason the UP freight trains exclusively used brand new GE dash 9s in armour yellow, never any ex-SP power post 1996.
The freight action through that town as so boring and the GE widecabs so relentlessly dull, it actually extinguished my interest in trains for a few years as a kid. I remember being held up as a crossing one night with my dad and saying "Ugh, I don't want to learn any more about GE AC4400s or whatever they are, aircraft seem more interesting to me now". Leave it to UP to kill my interest in railfanning at age 10.
I still cherish that my Mom handed me the camera at age 5, I still have many of the photos I took during that trip, including a Santa Fe GP30 rebuild somewhere in the central valley, and a few portraits of random passengers.
