Death from above diorama, part 1

I’ve been working on a little side project while waiting on the paint on other projects to dry. I thought it would be cool to build a 1:144 scale diorama of a Hawker Typhoon destroying a German tank. The plan is to mount the plane flying over the tank mid-explosion, with the tank’s turret flying off.

I started by buying a Revell Microwings Hawker Typhoon kit, which cost me a whopping €2,50. The shipping cost more than the kit... Then I looked for an affordable German tank in scale 1:144. Victrix Models has a nice line of tanks in that scale, but you can only purchase boxes of six and I only needed the one. In the end I bought two toy Panther tanks on Wish for a total of €3,- (including shipping!). A month later, the little tanks arrived from China and I could start building.

Here are the cheap Panther tanks. The turrets came separate and I have not pressed them down fully here, because I didn’t know if I would be able to remove them again.

For some reason the tanks were fitted with four wheels and a ball bearing, but these were easily removed.

Next up was making the base. I used the same sort of MDF base as with my Von Richthofen and Brown diorama and added a little ridge/hill from a scrap piece of blue foam. In this picture the foam has been given a coating of wall filler and the MDF has gotten a coat of primer.

I then drilled a hole through the base and hot glued a length of metal wire to the bottom of the base for mounting the plane. As the Typhoon model is a lot bigger and heavier than the WWI planes in my other diorama, I used two strands of wire twisted together. When the diorama is done, you won’t be able to see most of it anyway, as it will be covered in smoke. I also hot glued a wire to the bottom of the tank turret, which I then attached to the other wire to make it look as if the turret had separated from the tank and came flying off.

Here, I have applied texture to the base by gluing on used coffee grounds.

I then applied the base colours, at which stage the diorama looked like utter garbage... I also added some more coffee grounds to create ridges on either side of the dirt road.

And here is the base a couple of washes and drybushes later. I had a ton of little balkenkreuz decals left from when I ordered the wrong decals for my 1:100 tanks, so I added a couple of those. I also glued on some clump foliage for a bit of variation. Next week, I hope I’ll have the plane finished. I’ll also have to give the way I’m going to make the fire/smoke some more thought.

Comments

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Space Wolves killteam

Time for my second 100 pt. kill team, this time featuring the ever popular sci-fi Vikings known as Space Wolves. It’s a nice little group of three Intercessors and three Reivers. The new Primaris models are massive compared to the old Tactical Space Marines and to make them look even more impressive I based hem on bits of cork painted to look like rocks. The models were primed in Citadel Fenrisian grey. After this, I painted most of the details apart from the faces of the two tough guys that are too cool to wear helmets. I then gave everything a black wash and added (a bit crudely) the odd edge highlight. I then painted the faces following a pretty simple process of applying a base skin colour, washing with brown and then highlighting with a lighter skin tone. Finally, I drybrushed the rocks with dark grey, then light grey and finally very gently with white. As a finishing touch I added two layers of AK Snow Sprinkles for a nice half-melted snow look. I took my...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

Search This Blog