Taking the advice of better painters than me, I have started trying different scales and topics from my normal ones (ie 28mm historical/fantasy) in an effort to improve my painting skills. I never got into 1/35 scale military models as a kid. The kits were too expensive so I stuck to cheap 1/72 scale aircraft. But I always wanted to try 1/35 scale kits and doing so got another item off the bucket list. I wanted to go all in and make a diorama base, try weathering pigments, etc. It's never too late for a happy childhood...
Wanting a small vehicle and some figures I purchased the Panzer II (f/g) tank with 5 figures from Tamiya (part no. 35009). A very old kit but this makes it cheap and I didn't want to spend too much money on a fancy. The figures are Afrika Korps so for the diorama base I wanted a north Africa look. Google images and an hour later I decided upon a very standard rocky desert ground scape. Most of the desert is sharp rock not sand so I needed lots of little rocks. Luckily I had a whole pile from my previous attempts of
making building rubble.
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| Raw board with corner rock |
The base was formed from 12mm ply with a border made from 16mm pine strips. In one corner I made a rock hillock from one of the plaster rock moulds I have. I chopped the plaster rock down to be square sided so it fitted. Plaster is quite easy to cut with a wood saw and can be sanded easily to smooth finish. It's just really messy when doing so.
Before I did anything more on the base I experimented with some small scale attempts to first get a look of the rocky ground right and secondly to get the paint job correct. I had all the rocks I needed but wasn't sure on how to attach them to the base. I needed something covering the wood and didn't want to use fine sand as it would look out of scale and too uniform.
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| Plaster rocks, texture paste and PVA glue |
My first experiment was to try just using PVA glue to stick a pile of rocks down. That didn't work too well as the larger rocks fell off and the spaces in between the rocks weren't covered. The second attempt was to put down a layer of texture paste and then push the rocks into this. That way there were no uncovered spaces. However the adhesive qualities of texture paste weren’t great. So of course I took the fool's logic and combined the two. I first lay down a thick coat of texture paste. Then I pushed in a selection of rocks and finally coated everything with a layer of watered down PVA glue.
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| It does get better |
The whole thing looked a mess. The next day it was still not fully dry and the rocks moved slightly. I considered it a failure but left it for a few more days. The good news was that after approx. 3 days the texture paste and PVA had dried and all the rocks (big and small) were very solid in the base. So I had a technique for making rocky ground. When I did it large scale on the base I left it for four days to dry fully. Now for the paint job.
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| The bare patch is were the tank goes |
Using my sample I painted it VGC Earth and dry brushed the rocks with Pale Brown/Iraqi Sand/White. This left the rocks looking pasty and the spaces between the rocks were darker than the rocks which was not correct. I then toned everything down with some Vallejo pigments. This also coloured the spaces between the rocks (ie the sand in real life). I used Dark Yellow Ochre, Light Yellow Ochre and Light Slate grey. The end result was pretty close to what I wanted. I also later used the Light Yellow Ochre to blend in the boots of the figures to the ground.
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| Near final result - just needs a tank and border cleanup |
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