Santa Cruz Decals is a new company in Portugal that specializes in decals of the Portugese Air Force.  They have a variety of decals in 1/72, 1/48 and 1/32. 

This particular decal sheet includes the Tiger head decals themselves and the national insignias and some colour bands for the top area of the tail of the plane as well as serial numbers for the side of the fuselage at the rear.  The rest of the Tiger scheme has to be painted by the modeller which is to be expected on these wrap around schemes.  Although the instruction sheet is in black and white, there are 3 websites mentioned on the instruction sheet for the modeller to get additional reference material.  The instruction sheet doesn't mention any paint colours, so the modeller will have to use his own best guess to sort out what colours to use by looking at colour photos of this jet on  the Internet.  The paint scheme is basically 3 colours....black, orange and an off white/pale yellow.  This paint scheme would take a bit of patience to do....but considering the scale is 1/72, I doubt most modellers would bother to attempt to get the paint scheme 100% perfectly shaded and accurate.  To do this paint scheme you'd first do the off white, then the orange would be shaded onto the jet...and finally the black would be airbrushed onto the jet.  The use of raised masks would probably help to get the stripes just right.  

The printing quality of these silk screened decals is beautiful and perfectly in register.  The printing quality is also very sharp and crisp.....I look forward to using them to build an Alpha Jet trainer.

My thanks to Santa Cruz Decals for the review sample.

Steve Bamford