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.

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

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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

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