I doubt there could, at least for someone my age, be a more appropriate subject/victim for a Saturday Afternoon Special than a Matchbox kit, so I'll start the party with one of those. No paint will be involved, at least in the first stage, just multicoloured plastic and decals.
In case any still doesn't know what the bits look like before the entertainment starts:
I'm probably a wierdo, but I don't think I ever treated models as toys with a "some assembly required" note attached. I think the very earliest dinosaur kits I built suffered use as toys, and the soft plastic Airfix figures and vehicles were certainly played to death, but not models built from kits. Honestly don't know why; perhaps being raised by craftsmen quickly infected me with a more respectful view of stuff build by hand. Whatever the reason, the closest I came to throwing a model together in the afternoon and playing with it in the evening was high speed construction of (mostly) Matchbox kits.
I still have a set of decals for this kit left from the old days, which will be helpfull when I dive into the second stage of this project, outside the GB context. Even as a kid, I occasionally picked up previously built bare plastic models, and updated them to what was then my current state of the art with a brand new paintjob. This Spitfire will take that path, with a second stage of hairy stick painting, with old fashioned enamels over a period of one or two days at most, and new decals. Not in accordance with the GB brief, but certainly in line with the nostalgic theme.
Some earlier editions of the same kit, about 35, 40 years old. Yes, I know, the Dutch one has aftermarket decals on it, but I had those when I was barely out of primary school, so I consider it valid.
