Sweet Victory! Sweet Experience!

My winning entry(Tamiya Modelling Competition 14-19 Aug 2007).

Peace,

All praises and thanks to God, the Lord of the worlds. It was a gloomy and rainy day at Millenia Walk but it was a fun and exciting experience for me at the Tamiya Modelling Competition 2007. All because my entry was a winner at the dioramas section. It was even sweeter cause this is my first time taking part and second diorama I attempted since picking the hobby up again after many years.

I'm glad that I documented the WIP in pictures and be able to remember this sweet memory for years to come. Of course this will inspire me to go for more challenging projects ahead. God willing.

Here are photos of the 5-day event and some of the modelling winners. Enjoy! Hurray! More pics at the convention:http://www.outthere.info/tamiyacon07/page1.htm

Project: Falaise Pocket Argentan COMPETITION DAY!

Peace to all,

Today is competition day and I took a few more photos and did last minute touch-ups after dat. Here are the photos. I have taken out some things and added some if you noticed. I took out the street lamp cause I placed the anti tank gun further back behind the archway. Another change was that I added posters at the side of the building.

Let me describe to you all the whole process of this project. It went like this:

Stressful: cause I am worried whether I could finish in time. I spend bout 2 1/2 months of my time for this one. There's only 1 competition a year. I don't wanna wait another year.

SHOCKING cause I see no one at the competition. I'm very early! Do they give points for that? Darn! Judging is on Sunday.

RELIEF cause now I can relax and wind down and wait for the outcome.

Hopefully I could get a placing in the competition and have some more fun and fufilling modelling days ahead. Lets see what happens this Sunday. I'll snap more photos of the competition when I go back one of these days.

WIP: Falaise Pocket 6 Argentan

After the figures were all done, I started on the M4 Sherman. I airbrushed it with a base coat using Vallejo's olivedrab and light olive in a ratio of 1:8 and it turned out too bright for me. So I repainted it with olivedrab. It nows turns out to be too dark for me.

What I did next was to apply a filters (very diluted light olive) a few layers till it has light coloured patches. I read this from an article from missing-links site. Its very informative cause I did'nt know that washes had different varieties. After thats done, I applied a coat of mat varnish to lock the colours down.

In between I put together the scene to check whether everything fits well.

As I was relaxing, I saw an image of a flag on the building's 3rd storey and got the idea to scratchbuild a German flag. At first I wanted to use a cloth as the flag but it was very difficult to get the shape that I wanted. In the end I experimented using plain printing paper and it turned out fine. At least to my eyes.

Next step, I weathered the tank and figures with the Tamiya weathering set to blend everything together. The tracks of the tank were weathered with flat earth colour and also drybrushed with a mixture of tile grout and earth colours. The Geramn fuel drums were painted with Mr Colour German Grey and weathered with rust colour from Humbrol.

So below is the almost complete setup. I know I forgot to explain something but anyway here you go.

WIP: Falaise Pocket 5 Argentan

Next step, I weathered the cobblestone by applying fine sand over diluted PVA glue. Then I applied burnt sienna wash onto the sand to weather it abit.


As you can see now the rubble pile I made earlier have been glued together and glued onto the base and painted and drybrushed with blacks and greys and finally some brick and sand colours.

The exciting part of course is the figure painting. Here are some stages of painting. I used acrylics thruout but used a combination of figure painting techniques of oil and acrylics painting(from the Historicus Forma and Finescale forum). I think I did okay with the technique I devised.

Batch painting in progress...



For the skin I mainly used Dark flesh, dwarf flesh and elf flesh all from citadel miniatures paint.The acrylic technique is called feathering. Though it turned out well, I still believe paintings in oils is the ultimate goal. Next time I'll try dat.

WIP: Falaise Pocket 4 Argentan

Hi all,
I been busy painting and weathering and I've been slow to update this blog. Okay 4 days to competition and so let me backdate the blog abit.

Since the update on the furniture build, there's a bit of a photo sequence jump. Somehow I forgot to shoot the photos of the base painting of the building. There were actually three layers of airbrushing done on the building at this point. The brickwork on the building, I used barnyard red with some orange colours to vary the colours.

I also painted the groundwork by this time. I primed with citadel scorched brown and used a combination of vallejo greys and sand colours.


On top of that I fitted a street lamp at the side of the building and weathered it by drybrushing rust colour over the black colours. I also drybrushed the lamp with a metallic grey colour.

Next I basecoated the troops with dark sea grey. Also, notice that I have added the German Pak 3.7cm anti tank gun in the line up. Another addition is the oil barrels from Tamiya's German oil drum set. These I primed with black and painted it with Mr Colour's German Grey.

And lastly the archway was primed with black and each brick was painted randomly using grey and sand colours from Vallejo. Pale sand colours were used for drybrushing to lighten the stonework so that it complements with the lighter surroundings. It still looks dark at that point I think.

WIP: Falaise Pocket 3 Argentan

Okay the next step I did was to make some bricks of differet sizes from paper clay and foamboard. These would later be added to my rubble pile and as strewn debris.



With the building ready to be painted I had bouts of "itchy fingers" and began scratch building miniature furniture to furnish my building. I used combination of balsa, tooth picks and scrap wood to create these. Suddenly I was asking myself, " Am I building a war dio or doll house?"



I began putting together everything to see what position looks good. I replaced the Cromwell tank with an M4 Sherman. Also, I began piling up
rubble and broken wood inside the building to see how the combination presents itself and whether I need more materials to complete this.(Cont' next post)

WIP: Falaise Pocket 1 Argentan

Hi again,
This will be the first time I will be writing down the step by step process of building my dio so I hope everyone bear with me.

As I mentioned on my previous post, the diorama I am building is the scene at Argentan, France Aug 1944. The first thing I did was to brainstorm for ideas and come up with interesting scenes for this project.

At first I sketched an idea on paper and played around using Lego blocks to visualize the scene.

Soon however I got some more ideas using just the Lego blocks. I discovered that it just saves time for me.

The Story

The scene is basically US infantry from the 80th division with armour support trying to liberate the French city of Argentan. The real event was that this relatively new division had not seen real combat since its arrival into Normandy. The Germans defending the city however were battlehardened troops and were desperate to hold the city till their larger force escape the Falaise pocket which were about to be cut off by Allied forces. Argentan was the last city in this pocket and Germans had to hold on to it long enough. The initial assault by the 80th division were quite disasterous as the German had their best Tiger tanks and troops defending the city. After several unsuccesful assaults, the US army pounded the city into ruins for several days to demoralise the Germans before making another attempt to liberate the city.

Next was to build the base for my dio so I bought a frame and plywood about 30 by 25cm. I then glued and nail them to keep em together. Next I painted the frame black and applied some wood varnish to the surface and sides of the base. Then I masked the sides with tape to protect it for the work that is going to pile on top of it. (Con't next post)