I just received a set of “seagulls” from Hardcorps Models out of Little Elm, Texas. They were sculpted by Gordon Stronach. It took a bit of doing to purchase these having had some problems with PayPal recognizing the site. Once David Harper and I worked out a way for him to get my payment, the seagulls arrived pretty quickly. They were well packed in a 3 inch square zip lock bag inside a 2.5 by 3 inch styrene flip open box. There is neither label nor painting directions. Each of the three birds is a one piece casting in yellow-white resin with no immediately visible air holes. There is minimal feather detail, but these birds look quite smooth and most gulls have pretty sharp delineations between colors.

The two birds with extended wings have a small square of resin where the legs would be but not foot detail. The seated gull has a round peg of resin in this place. The bird with up raised wings has no visible pour plug and the one with outstretched wings has the plug at the tip of the tail. The sitting bird’s plug is at the bottom of the resin peg. Clean up of these should be effortless at worst. There are a few fine bits of resin on each at the mold lines but these should present no problem to clean up as well.

On to the anatomy. The seated bird, whose neck is somewhat pulled back is 1.25 cm long. The others have a body length of 1.75 cm and a wing span of 3.18 cm. At 1/35, the bodies fall very close for a herring gull or a black backed gull, two of the more common gulls in the north east. The wings each have a crook in them and are not fully extended and this may explain a bit or shortness in the wings. However, the proportions look right. In short, these look like “seagulls.”
I mentioned earlier there were no painting instructions and this allows the painter to choose pretty much any type of gull based on the location being depicted. The painter will need to do a bit of research to get the colors right for the bird and locale, but this should be pretty easy.

While the review page requires a location and time period, these could be useful in any coastal setting and time period.