Diorama Elements: A European WW2 Shed

 While my last project took a while and suffered from some unpleasant setbacks (i.e. the turret breaking), It did give me the opportunity to dive into a really interesting part of vignettes/dioramas - buildings. They can range from just being a part of the "terrain" all the way to being complex strucutres and the main focus of a diorama. In this case, the former was the case and my little shed serves as a background and vertical element in my vignette for the Panzer IV. Thus, this article will focus on the process of planning the layout as well as the building and painting of the vignette. While I will mention the terrain and vegetation, the focus will be on out little shed.

When taking a look at the finished result, it is immediately evident that the main focus of the vignette is to showcase the tank and its crew sitting in a central and exposed position. To aid directing the visual interst from a normal viewing angle, the building is placed behind the tank. The roof is the highest point in the diorama and thus presents a distinct vertical element which is always important to make a diorama or a vignette look more visually pleasing and interersting. To conclude, the building serves as a "frame" for the tank in both hight and depht. This of course only applies to the usual viewing angles of the front 2/3 of the whole vignette.

Over the course of previous projects, I have foundthat planning the layout at the start of the build often results in the most convincing builds when it comes to dioramas and vignettes. In practical terms it means that I assembled the main subassemblies of the vehicle and the figures to be able to measure them and place them on a piece of paper to determine the location and the angle it will sit at. A piece of cardboard was cut and bent 90° to act as aplaceholder for the building .

As visible in the photo above, I paid attention to position the building and the vehicle at an angle to the sides of the base. This serves to give more dynamic to the whole scene. While I did put the tank not in complete parallel to the building, I would in hindsight recommend  a steeper angle between the two than I have chosen to use here. Also note that minor elements of the layout can easily be changed during the build (as it will be the case here) as long as none of the major elements get completely changed. In fact, changing details can be important to refine the preliminary vision of a project (at least I´d like to think that ;) ).

With the planning out of the way, I noted the dimesions and made a 2D sketch of the building on another piece of paper. This step is also the one to design the overall look and features of the structure one wants to create. In this case, I wanted to represent a rual shed built from bricks and wooden planks as they appear in rural central Europe around 1944-1945 coinciding with the vehicle´s markings. 

 Creating brickwork on miniature buildings can be achieved in different ways by either cutting individual bricks or carving the structure into a suitable material. The later is the case here, as I used foamcore board which had the paper removed on the outer side. This allowed me to use several tools as such as toothpicks, the hobbybladeand a ruler to press/carve in the texture. It went reasonably well and the result was quite acceptable, but I will defintely try some product like AK´s dedicated carving foam or Balsafoam in the future.

 

 

Onto the basic roof-construction I added thinner strips from balsawood to give additional depth and detail besides the brickwork. The frame of the base is made from balsawood glued around a piece of packaging styrofoam. Do note, that insulation or higher density foams can be cut much more precisely than the loose packaging stuff I used here and can thus save you a lot of trouble as you do not necessary have to built a whole "case" but can just glued thin balsa to the already straight sides.

With the main shape of the shed done, I glued it to the base and blended the back side with the frame. At this point of the build I decided on the final form of the roof tiles. To bring in some more "rural" look, I choose to cut square tiles of slightly different sizes from plastic card. Also, I added a square plastic rod as a base for the door I wanted to add to the building. In hindsight it may have been better to cut the opening into the wall instead of just putting the door on top of the wall. As it will remain closed however, this is not that much of an issue. Additionally, I added ground texture using an acrylic paste from AMMO and put on some stepstones from ripped carboard (thanks to Uncle Nightshift for the inspiration here :) ). The wooden parts were coated in a thick varnish from the local art store to prevent them "fussing" too much. Plastic card was textured using a hand saw for building the door and its frame, a handle was also built in from wire. Nail holes were punched in the wooden planks.  The whole assembly was then primed to unify the different materials.

I started the painting process by spraying the wooden parts of the house with Tamiya Deck Tan to achieve a good base for old, somewhat worn wood. This light base is important in small scale as one would risk the overall look to get too dark when using a more brown base colour. An earth tone was sprayed to the ground. Combined with late steps, this lighter colour will be turned to a muddy looking ground later on.

The bricks and roof tiles were painted by brush using a red brown acrylics from Vallejo. A simple brown wash was put over the wooden parts and blended a little bit. This simple step already made those parts look a lot like wood. I then mixed plaster with a little grey paint and brushed it between the bricks to simulate the mortar.

After the plaster was dried, I used  whole pallette of red and brown paints to pick out indivvidual bricks in different colours. This gave the wall some more visual texture. The same was done to the roof tiles, although with slightly different shades. Different grey paints were used to pick out stones and the walkway tiles.

Different wood colours from AMMO were then used to enhance the wood grain texture on various parts. Also I used thinned paints as glazes to subtly shift the colour of whole panels to distiguish them from another making for a much more natural looking woodwork.

As I do not have a static grass applicator, I had to add grass in form of premade tufts and small ammounts of strains placed individually using white glue. Applying the grass before the priming of the base would have allowed me to use the airbrush to shift the colours to my liking, but I did not do it here, as I was happy with the colours of grass I had at hand. I used some scatter for model railroads to give some more variation to the ground especially on the ares that did not recieve vegetation. Seafoam twigs were glued down to serve as the base for bushes.

Three differnet enamel earth washes were wetblended to shift the ground tones and create a more muddy "hole" in the foreground. Deliberate ammounts of dirt and mud were apllied onto the lower walls of the house to tie it in with the ground a little more.

Then, my attention went to the roof of the building. I used a wash to enhance the gaps between the tiles and splattered a light gray rainmarks wash onto the roof to represent lichen, dirt and other discolouration.

I followed this up with a green grimy wash to make some green stains representing moss and other plants. Note that suitably fine scatter material could potentially be used to represent some large moss-growth.

This was also applied to the walls and the walkway.

On some wooden parts I also added a grimy effect to represent plant/algeae growth and/or decay.

The vegetation was finished of by completing the bushes by adding some flocking material to the ends of the branches. 

This was the final step on the base and it just remained to paint the frame black. Do note that the very same colours used to create the groundwork were used to weather the tank.
The effect of the building "framing" in the central area of the base is evident in the picture above.

 

 

Overall I learned more than I expected from this little shed and definetly got a taste of what creating buildings in diormas is all about: layout and details. I plan to do more diorams and vignettes including buildings and other strucutres in the future as techniques and focus-points will likely differ between eras and different architectural styles.

Hopefully this article will be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to me doing buildings and structures... future will tell ;) In any case I hope to have sparked some thoughts and maybe given some advice.

Cheers and happy modelling,

Tom

T-72 SIM-1: Building and painting the Georgian T-72 in 1/72

 There are always some sorts of vehicles in history, that tend to appear litteraly everywhere and thus become some must-have subjects for us modellers. For the modern armour enthusiast the Russian/Soviet T-72 main battle tank fits into this category... And I noticed I didn´t have one in my collection!

 

On the search went for a kit and I quickly ended up picking the Modelcollect T-72 SIM-1 in 1/72, as I was intigued by the designation... If only Modelcollect had not just given a slightly changed T-72AV! But more on that later.

So, what is a T-72 SIM-1? To put it short, it is a T-72A/M with ERA used by Georgia. In the early 2000s efforts where made to improve the combat capabilities of the T-72s, which ended in the creation of an upgrade package focussing on aspects as such as target aquisition and communication. The vehicle features an Elbit systems GPS system, Kontakt-1/5 reactive armour tiles, Harris-Corporation radios and a polish made FCS akin to that of the PT-91 Twardy. The vehicles were deelivered from 2005 and participated in the 2008 hostilities.

 

The kit made by Modelcollect from China contained lots of plastic giving you a load of potential spare parts. Only one of the many sprues was exclusively dedicated to the T-72 SIM-1. Details where nicely executed and tracks are of the link and length variety. Additionally, the lower hull is cast and gives the finished model some good weight of its own.

 

However, the one most distinct feature of the SIM-1 was missing in the kit! This is the antenna at the rear of the turret behind the loader, which is part of the GPS system. Thus, I had to scour the internet for photos of the device. As there is only a limited ammount of photos, I decided to go for a rough "guesstimation" of the positioning and size. That meant sanding several layers of platic card into shape for the upper part and cutting smaller strips and bits for the mount.

Instead of fitting the toolbox as described in the instructions, I added a snorkel to the turret side which I also textured a little with MR Surfacer 500. This represents cast stell, as the basic turret structure of the T-72 is cast from steel.

As additional visual interest is always welcome on a scale model, I decided to mobilize my limited sculpting abilities and created some tent-rolls and a tarp. Together with the fitting of the PE lightguards this concluded the initial assembly. I left the side ERA-plates seperate to be able to better paint the rubber protion of the side skirts.

While painting I decided to give the vehicles colour some variation by doing a so called "distressing" by spraying chipping-fluid (or Hairspray) onto a lighter base colour and then adding a darker one, which is then chipped to reveal some of the lighter "worn" colour.

Sounds nice, eh? I did however encounter a problem: If you want two distinct layers, it is advisable to make the two tones a little more different from each other tah  I did here... well lesson learned :)

I continued by painting the bigger rubber poirtions of the side skirts in a rubber colour. Here one has to note, that it should not be black, as 1.) rubber isn´t completely black IRL and 2.) smaller scales require lighter shades of paint to look appropriate. Thus I went with a (still really dark...) grey.

I also used acrylics as a glaze (heavily thinned, translucent paint) to differentiate some parts and give some highlights to the model. The unditching beam and the stowage were also painted and very subtly highlighted.

A pinwash helped to bring out some additional depth from an average viewing distance.

After that, I did not proceed with chipping, but gave the model aflat-coat in preparation for a first weathring layer using chipping varnish.

As the T-72 SIM-1 often operated in a dusty environment, I wanted to have a layer of old dust on the lower portion of the vehicle that looks like it had been worn and washed away over time. Theoretically, this would be a very fitting foundation for some "fresher" dust/dirt made with enamels.
I mixed this first dust colour from Tamiya Buff and Earth and then sprayed it heavilly thinned in light layers onto the chipping varnish applied beforehand in 2 layers. After about 5-8min, I took some wet brushes and proceeded to wear down the dust coat. Vertical surfaces were treated with a streaking down motion, the horizontal ones where randomly tapped. The result was again sealed with varnish.

I was very pleasantly surprised with the result I got and it was an excellent base for further weathering.

Fits, I however added the chipping effects via paintbrush. The dust coat nicels gave me an orientation of where chips would be visible and fit int with the weathering. This was the reason for leaving chipping until after the dust coat was applied. Chipping was done with two colour. A lighter green for the light chips and a dark grey for representin some deeper ones. On modern vehicles, many parts are from aluminium, thus I could have used some metallic colour on the chipped fenders, but decided against it.

 

The further weathering consisted of first speckling AMMO splashes effects (which has a nice texture of its own) over the dust coat, representing thrown up and dried earth and then giving some variation by speckling a bit of an earth colored AMMO wash over the previous effects to give the weathering even more variety. Thus, there are technically 3 different layers of dust present on the vehicle. I finished that up by adding som very light spalshes from Rainmark effects on the upper part of the vehicle.
The tracks ahad been painted in light gray and where weathered with the same first two washes.

It is important to not, that the dust coat and the enamel effects should be fitting to each other!

Now it only remained to put a black wash on the engine air intakes to simulate the space beneath and backen up the muzzle break and the exhaust using pigments. For the exhaust, I did some streaking using the black wash, as the Russain diesel engines of T-72s, T-55/64s etc. tend to "digest" a lot of oil and fuel, which is then being "spit out" of the exhaust as a black-ish sud. For representing engine oils, and fuel stains, it is a nice touch to add some gloss effect to the enamles colours (in my case Wet Effects) to set the stains apart from the rest of the surface.
After adding some metallic colour spots on the exposed track cleats and headlight, I called the model finished.

I hope this article was a good representation of what I did on this model and it contains tips or maybe even inspiration for anyone wanting to to a similar weathering approach on their models :)

Thus: Enjoy the final pics!

Cheers, 

Tom