Thursday, November 24, 2011

Hobby Boss M3A1 Scout Car

This is a project I have been working on behind the scenes for Military Modelcraft International and will be featured in a future issue. The photos posted here were not submitted to the magazine, so I thought I would share them with my followers.

The resin display base is a Celticwerks base and can be found on their products page, number CWS005. The foliage is from the Silflor range and while fairly expensive, looks the part when it comes to live plants. The figure is made up of some older Verlinden airborne soldier parts taken from the spares box. 

The build was loosely based upon a photo in a Steve Zaloga book, showing a camouflaged scout car providing support to the 82nd airborne in Italy, found on page 29 of Concords, US Tank Battles- in North Africa and Italy 1943-45.

















  





Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Darius Miniatures - Complete

Well, I apologize for the long wait but I have been distracted with many other things outside modeling. Enough of the excuses though, lets get right to it.

Since my last update I finished the wooden box on the front bumper with some dark brown oil paint and attached the figure in place and applied some Wet Effects to his boot. I painted the two signs to represent some of the areas in the no famous 'Battle of the Bulge' and added a bit on snow on the sign tops and the half track itself.

I received some advanced releases from a new company offering diorama plants and accessories, at the time of this posting, their website is still under construction and I have no word as to any sort of time frame for it's opening. The various dried plants and ground cover items are sourced from nature and appear both in scale and quite realistic, especially in context of a fall/winter setting. These items are delicate and somewhat small but are easily assembled into clusters and applied with ordinary white PVA glue.






 



All that was left now was to create a simple wooden base, paint it black and attach the finished vignette to it in order to complete the project. I can only try to express just how much I enjoyed working with this resin vignette from Darius Miniatures, not only does it simplify the whole process of creating a well balanced scene but it also keeps it contained to a small area on the shelf once completed. I can foresee many more of these in my future, as long as they continue to produce Allied topics that is.

*and preferably, some that aren't just knocked out vehicles.*