Slow progress on the violinist diorama

Wasn’t feeling the mojo this week at all.  On the plus side I managed to watch Ant-man (which I liked more than expected), Captain America Civil War (which felt like everyone was going through the motions, except of the actors who didn’t turn up - no Hulk?) and John Wick (watched for the second time, and still good).

Wall section

I made a number of attempts on the wall section but nothing was working.  In the end I went for a sandstone look and repainted everything with a base coat of VMC Tan Yellow.  The iron fence is base coated in a mix of VMA Black Metal and VMC Dark Sea Blue (to take the shine out of the metallic).

More boxes, base coats

Although I was happy with the boxes I painted last week, on reflection they looked way too extreme and cartoonish for my liking.  So I made two new boxes.  This time I used balsa wood strips around a core of pine.  I was afraid the metal pins of the figure in the soft balsa wood of the original box would result in the figure coming loose over time.  However the pine won’t have this issue.  Also the glue bond onto the wooden base will be better.

More pots

I went back to the terracotta pots and started working on them.  They are going ok.  Still thinking about filling the larger one with some water effects/slime/fish.

Wooden core of the resin brick wall

For the brick wall I needed a solid foundation.  I cut three strips of ply and glued them together to be the core of the wall.  The resin brick walls will glue onto this piece of wood.  This way I can pin and glue the wall to the diorama base and not have it move at all.  To get a smooth slope I used polyfilla and sanding it back to the line of the slope.  The larger piece of ply will be where the resin walls glue on.  For the other two sides I will glue on plastic card to get a smooth finish (hence why I used the polyfilla so the plastic card has some support underneath it).  You could sand/fill/sand multiple times (like I did for the base of El Torres), or just go for the plastic card finish (which I did for my 54mm Samurai) which is a lot faster and results in a better finish.