SPA Modeler

Stikpusher - Thanks the the minute attention to detail, mate. Working to change the boots to brown!

Joe - Sorry to hear that, Joe. But you are not alone. I had the same experience. in my town there is an military air force base. the-then base commander loved modeling so he sat up one of the rooms to display scaled-version of Indonesian military aircraft. some were made of wood, other resin, some are Styrene kits. I actually contributed a 1/72 Airfix F-27 Fokker Friendship. But since his rotation and a new commander was in place, my friend who befriended the outgoing commander said it was unclear if the collection was kept or scrapped.

Figure #4, Marine Walking
The forth figure is this soldier in a walking pose. The head and figure is from MasterBox. You can see the head is a tad too wide making it look awkward with the helmet. the helmet itself has a strange (ugly) shape. It only looks good at certain angles. it shape shifting depends on your view angle.


The only modification is the arms so that the rifle leans to his right.


Primer using Tamiya (white)


After painting with artists oils. you can still see the paint is rather glossy.


The helmet straps are made from Tamiya masking tape.

Figure #5, Soldier Kneeling
This is the third and last Marine that will be posed on top of the tank's turret. It's from the Miniart kit and it includes the original head and helmet. Like the ones from Masterbox, the head and helmet looks awfully strange. But I kept it so that there is a diversity. if I use all my Hornet heads, all the six figures will look the same too!. I had to mix them up a bit.




in-progress photos. Just finished the artist oil paints for the skin color.


the face does not have any strong feature. its expression is very placid. The boot needs to be re-painted to brown.

I think what the issue is with the heads and helmets is their proportions to the heads. The countours look right, especially for having the helmet covers. But the helmets look like just the liner and not the steel pot on the figures’ heads.

I've had a similar helmet issue with Dragon's Panzergrenadiers. On some, the helmet snugged down properly, on others I had to carefully trim the crown so it would fit in the helmet.

Stikpusher and Joe - Its really hard getting a correct looking helmet from a regular box kit. oh boy, the Dragon kits too. Ditto.

lawman56 wrote:I've had a similar helmet issue with Dragon's Panzergrenadiers. On some, the helmet snugged down properly, on others I had to carefully trim the crown so it would fit in the helmet.

Ash Effect
The last big effort for the vignette is to make the ash around burnt out tanks. In the T-34, these ash are seen as the results of burnt rubber pads of the road wheel (and other stuff as well).


I made a pile of real ash from buring cigarettes. These are Kretek cigarettes. local cigarette variant with cloves mixed with tobacco leaves. This pile of ash is from 5-6 cigarettes, cut and diced and light up until they all turn to ash.


With a spatula, they were simply added into the space between the burnt road wheels.


The chips are rather large, so I need to make a finer one to go on top. They will be filtered to get fine ash and colored to represent white/light grey colored ash.


Here is a small batch of finely filtered ash. I added AK white pigment into a smaller batch and mixed it up until they turn light grey.


A closer look of the fine ash. now in light grey color


All I did was to place the dark charcoal ash first and then top that off with the light colored grey. I used an old brush and spread them out. a bit thicker in the inside and thinner once it gets further out


They are pretty loose, so I fixed them by spraying diluted white glue.

The Tree.
Elevation is always good to have in a vignette. Here, I wanted to enhance the landscape with adding a tree. I made several attempts. first one was using copper armature. it failed miserably.


under scaled, and I just couldn't get a sense of where I was heading to.

Then I went for real twigs. these are from a local tree called Rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum). I have many trees in my front yard but the branches of the Rambutan tree gave the best look.


First I went for a large branch and it looked over-scaled. I scrapped that again.

The third effort was looking for a smaller and slimmer branch for the main stem. Also from the Rambutan tree. but for the 1/35 scale 'branches' I found the dried flower cluster (panicles) of the teak wood tree (Tectona grandis) to be perfect.


I cut off the smaller twigs from this dried flower cluster and glued it onto the branch (I drill the branch first so it sticks well)


The finish tree and where and how it will look on the vignette

Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.

Very convincing work. With each update I'm getting more impressed!

LULZ

mostrich wrote:Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.

Very convincing work. With each update I'm getting more impressed!