So – for reasons too complicated to go into – we were at the local aviation museum helping to make a willow-and-paper lantern for the Burns night parade. An artist had been provided to show us how it’s done and she had done some research in preparation.
‘I looked up a picture of a Spitfire on the internet,’ she said. ‘And I’ve done a design of how we might make it by weaving the willow together here.’
‘That’s great,’ said one of the museum guys. ‘There’s just one small problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That’s not a Spitfire in your picture. That’s a Zero‘
Google image search strikes again. Fortunately, the museum had a Spitfire of its own – still handily in pieces from where they fished it out of a local loch – to act as a more reliable guide for designing our lantern. Oh, and one of these, which was a more convenient size for working from indoors.
You may even get some piccies of the end result, one of these days.
OOPs…but they both have wings and the engine is in the front…
Aaron
Ah, but only the spitfire has the characteristic elliptical shaped wings. As I learned today…
True…but I didn’t wish to cloud the issue…LOL
Aaron
Typical! It does niggle me when that happens, and especially when it shouldn’t! xx
TBH, given the nature of the medium, you’d be hard pressed to tell a spitfire lantern from a Zero one, but we did make sure we got the wings right. After all, if the aviation museum can’t get its planes right, who can?
Of course not all Spitfires are equal and with different number of prop blades, varying air scoop configurations between the marks you want to make sure your reference models are both the same, otherwise you could end with some some ludicrous never before seen version
Whereas making it out of wicker isn’t ludicrous at all?