Diorama in the making
Added 2023-06-01 19:43:55 +0000 UTCMy friends! Yesterday I finally cleaned my workbench from all the paint bottles and dragged out some pieces of styrofoam from the stash.
The basic shape of the diorama was going to be simple from the beginning - a muddy, rutted road, and a small embankment with the tank driving up.
There's going to be a small tree in the background on the left, and a lot of grass. It sort of feels like a trip down memory lane to those days when simple scenic bases were all the rage for me :)
What I always find enjoyable about these simple scenes is the amount of detail you can add, and how you can focus better on the small stuff. The first hurdle of this scene was making the rutted road. I sculpted it in multiple layers with VMS Smart Mud (as usual), focusing first on the tank and the tracks marks behind it. Then the track marks from other vehicles pressed into a thick layer of the paste. The initial texture wasn't very exciting, so I left it to dry and then raised the rutted "walls" with more clay, and also making the embankment more exciting.
This was all just the sculpting stage - next up comes the wooden veneer and then texturing with Real Earth from My Garden (TM).
The tree will be interesting. I brought some nice natural tree-looking stuff from Spain (collected it in the middle of nowhere), and when I saw it for the first time, I immediately understood why so many beautiful dioramas with trees come from Spanish modelers! :)))
Oh, and it'll be situated in autumn!
