This is an Osprey book that is new to my experience. It is part of their Masterclass books and referred to as "The essential guide for the serious modeller'. Well as you know, to me a serious modeler is an oxymoron as modeling is supposed to be a fun and pleasurable pastime, but we all know people who are quite involved in the hobby and will take all those extra steps to produce a stellar piece of work.

This book will help you to become one of those people.

First off, this one is hardbound and done so with a sort of ring binding that allows the pages to lay flat once the book is opened. This is important for if you are trying to duplicate a procedure, you don't want to have to continually keep the pages from closing on you. Another interesting feature is that the left side pages are color coded to match color guides to the various chapters. Makes it easy to find what you are seeking in this manner.

You would expect a book like this to be full of large, clear, color images with easy to read captions to help out while you duplicate some skill and that is exactly what you get with no more than three large images per page.

you would also expect the book to cover as many different aspects of the genre as it could and that it does quite admirably with everything from working with resin and photo-etch to painting and detailing bases. It is all here under one cover.

Just to give you an idea of what's here, I'll run through the various sections:

Tools and Materials
Building a Dragon Tiger
More painting and finishing ideals
The basics of bases
Working with etched metal
Kits with resin and cast metal parts
A simple scratchbuild conversion
Hotchkiss Geschützwagen
Sturmgeschütz IV
IDF Tiran 5 main battle tank
References and research
Sources

So basically, you are shown everything you need to produce a superlative replica and with several examples to help you along. If you get no other book on armor modeling, this is the one you simply must have. It is that good.

November 2006

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