a) 1/72 Hasegawa Lockheed Orion. The kit box features a photograph of the real aircraft, showing that it doesn't have a uniform grey colour. This is most pronounced on the engines, which have some clean panels and a fair bit of oil staining on the rest. I'm attempting to represent this by lightening and darkening the paint between coats. Later, I'll use oil paint for weathering. However, at the moment it just looks badly painted. We'll see how this works out - watch this space.
b) Airfix 1/76 RAF recovery set. This consists of a mobile crane and a lorry towing a trailer. I built these two vehicles once before, modifying the crane to suit my model railway while building the trailer straight from the box. This time I'm doing it the other way round, making substantial changes to the trailer. The unmolested model is shown in the background of the second photograph above.