Friday, July 20, 2007

WIP: Falaise Pocket 2 Argentan

My plan was to create the diorama going from right to left but the Normandy building which I was looking for was not avalable yet and so I bought another Miniart model. I decided to change the direction looking from left to right since the building looks better that way.



The next step was to make the cobblestone pavement leading to the archway. I simply used foamboam and glued it onto the wooden base with PVA glue. Later I would score the cobblestone pattern onto them.

It's time to work on the Normandy city building. Yeh! I was excited at first when I first got it since it was the first time I ever bought a building. My LHS guy warned me about the rough work ahead since he build one a couple of months before and there's plenty of puttying and sanding to do but I guess I was too excited since it would be easier than scratch building one myself.



The most challenging portion about this build is cutting off the excess parts (windows and doors) since the front and back needs to be level so that it would joint evenly. Of course that was not possible and I ended up applying putty and sanding the joints to make it flat and even.



Then I followed up by scratch building the archway. Okay this was an idea I got from someone's website(can't remember the address sorry). The method was to use tile grout and pour it into a plywood mould and to create tiny bricks that looks realistic. Since I have some grout to spare I experimented with it. The dreaded part of this method was the mould building. The tedious part is definitely the moulding process. It gets messy and you have to wait 24 hours for one batch of about 20 bricks to dry. Anyway I ran out of grout to mould (got bout 40 bricks)and combined them with foamboard cut into small brick shape and glued them together to make the archway.



The cobblestone road was made using paper clay. Before the clay dried, I scored lines to create the cobblestone road.(cont' next post)