WIP [finished] Rolling Thunder

[Jenseits]

Thank you Adrian. I begin to gather a bit of late actually, especially since I am waiting for some "USAF" decals for the plane that are still in the post..

Well now it's time to show the hull as weathered. Big pictures because i like the way the hull looks like. Really battered indeeed
Painted with Acrylics, the metalic parts were weathered using inks.

 

[housecarl]

I sit waiting for the next instalment.
Carl.

 

[megroot]

Extremely well done.
Looking up to your next part.

Marc

 

[Meehan34]

me too, gimmie more.

 

[Jenseits]

Thanks Carl! Thanks marc! Thanks Mike!
from now on it will be ground cover time as well as blending the plane on its surroundings

Here is a very crowded working place indeed.. some bits of airbrushes, Model Air paints everywhere. And finally the worst brand of plaster I ever bought. With big grains in it –it’s suppose to be okay for walls, but i would hesitate using it even for this purpose. Anyway, it’s perfect for ground cover.
I will also use some dry moss as well as acryclic texture gel with sand in it.

So okay, let’s mix some plaster with moss and let’s apply it on the base..

at 2010-05-28and then paint it using thise mix of valejo paints as shown on the top left of the pictures as well as more Citadel inks.

 

[Jamie Stokes]

Hi Nicholas,

great to see your work progressing.

Question about plaster; have you ever thought about tinting the water before you add it to your plaster mix?

It may help cut down on reworks and so on if you ever miss a bit.

I do this always now, better then having "Plaster of Paris white' spots in my groundwork.

Not my idea, something that English model maker Richard Windrow demonstrates in his DVD on groundwork.

Back to the piece; Like the handling of the jet fragment, particularly the metal effects, and looking forward to how you work the water effects.

And yes, your pilot looks worse off after a contest between fighter, air defence, and gravity.

Cheers

 

[Argyll]

This is awesome!!!

 

[yeo_64]

Nicolas, my friend !
AWESOME WORK indeed !!!!! I really like the way you painted the aircraft wreckage and the padi fields; I can almost feel the rays of the sun as it slowly rises on this scene of death and destruction !!! Cheers !
Kenneth .

 

[clubcat]

Absolutely fantastic, it's been fascinating following the process. Congratulations on the work so far.

 

[Jenseits]

Thanks for the great feedback Jamie. you are right, I *should* have tint the platser for all the good reasons you ahve been citing. It's all a matter of thinkinf ofg it all day and forgetting it at the right time sheesh.
I was actually taken by the short drying time of that terrible plaster and ended up forgetting. I applied some other coats but indeed I had to use coats of diluted inks to "chase the white" afterwards

Thanks Argyll!

Thanks as usual Kenneth my friend -really the sun will be going down the scene not rising this time, well evertything will be bathed in orange and red hopefully



Thank you Melanie, this week i start the water, it should be fun..


I have been too much in a hurry on that one,hence something i was not very satisfied about.
Did you guys ever saw some rice field ? looks like some sort of cobweb,with some narrow mud passages between each square of water..
What could look rather nice would be to put the plane near one of the crossesthose mud passages are doing, sort of open the scene on the left side of thediorama.
So i put my Dremel and basically destroyed what i did the day before innarrowing the path. I was actually so much surprised by the bad quality of the plaster and its fast drying time that I completely forgot of tinting it thefirst time around. Well I corrected that this time and used some black ink to tint the plaster.

Look at this… Silflor grass, one of the diorama making’s worst capital sins.

Why do i say that, after all it’s « convenient », it looks « realistic ».
Hey it’s because everybody uses it the same way, so now whenever you look at some pics taken at a fair you see the same grass here and there.
My fault, I used it here *sigh*
Well, so that i can’t be accused using it exactly like everybody else does, here is my method. This grass comes in tufts glued on some sort of dried glue base. So my first reflex was to cut each tuft in 3 to 5 parts so that i could rearrange each tuft in a more convenient fashion.
After that I prepared a mix between paint Pigments (Mig here) and heavy acrylic gel so that I could cover the base of the grass with the mix in order for the grass parts to look like they really grow from the mud..

The last picture shows all the grass on the mud path.

 

[megroot]

Very convincing....and well done.
Up to the next step.

Marc

 

[Jenseits]

thanks Marc, well that's next step but it's still groundwork related

Okay, now after having applying the grass, better paint it. As the original colour was really too clear. Remember that there will be hopefully some lightning effect so that all the left part for the diorama should be left in some sort of shadow. So I painted the base of the grass in some sort of dark brownish green paint and painted the tip of the grass leaves facing the plane in some sort of electric green.
On the first picture you can see the effect I tried to do comparing right side of the picture with the unpainted left side.

But really what I also had to do was to complete the covering of the base of the grass tufts as well as painting the path in a more suitable colour than my vaguely tinted acrylic gel. So the second picture actually shows my mixes between paint, thick acrylic gel and pigments.

Last picture shows the complete path as painted. The rest of the ground looks really scruffy but I will repaint it next

 

[Meehan34]

Lots of cool techniques are being used, this is really a big help for creating ground work for figures.

 

[Ferris]

Good idea to hack up the grass lumps. It's visually pleasing to avoid the uniformity here.

Although real grass also grows in chuncky lumps. There is a lot of grass in the world so I'm not surprised you see these in many diorama's... ;-)

Looking forward to your water!

Adrian

 

[housecarl]

Freaky colour scheme.
Carl.

 

[Jenseits]

You know Mike, I think the rule to get a good groundwork is to never use what's being sold straight from the box -another ruile should be to never ever use photoetch for ground cover

Thanks you Adrian, here i didn't need to create something like a British grass garden, I really needed a few stray tufts where the people tramp on the path less regularly

aha yes carl, the pinkish colours uh? the plan is going to sit there, and i also repainted the ground on the following pics

So now time to fit the plane and the figure on the base -I forgot to tell yesterday that some of the cutting on the base was to allow the plane to fit near the path.
Thanks to some help I got on Aeroscale (Steffen and Tim), I was rightfully directed to some F-100 decals that would suit for a F-105, and indeed when I got those they really fitted with my own plane.

in truth it was some 25 years that last used some decals and gosh how the quality improved! Using only Future, I was able to twist those letters in all directions to fit the painfully twisted curves of my fuselage -of course i had to carefully cut those in the shape of the different broken panels.

But then i started being really afraid. As you can see on the diorama, the fuselage is way darker on the left side, and brighter with pure aluminium and gold colours on the right side (that's some lightning effect I want to get). But then those decals just were of some dark grey/blue flat colour from left to right, they really didn't fit at all! Suddenly they made my diorama look like some toy model kit.
So hey, no choice, optivisor, 003 brush and let's paint over the decals with some brownish hues where we need them and here comes my relief back again.
Actually, even if my picture is rather bad, I can tell you there is nothing left of the initial decal colour, but it was all worth it!

 

[pmfs]

This is pure art

 

[megroot]

I really like the color of this decals much more then the blue.
But i'm not a favorit of the yellow pink at the right. It get to much attention from the eye. The eye get's off the subject....

marc

 

[housecarl]

This just gets better.
Carl.

 

[Jamie Stokes]

Nicolas,
it is truly wonderful to see someone go out of their way to share how they do, what they do.

It's efforts like yours (here, and on other sites) that makes this hobby great.

The theme, although grim, is being handled with a degree of respect, and lots of craftsmanship.

Thanks for sharing,
I think its great work,

cheers

Jamie