¹⁄35

The Battle of Debecka Pass

Building the Diorama:

The dio is set on a 24” square base. The ground is carved rigid foam insulating material, glued to the base. A series of layers of texture material were added – lightweight spackle to fill big gaps, and both fine and coarse acrylic pumice gel to set up the ground plane. The entire base was painted with Vallejo IDF tan primer.

Then came making the field grass, which, while not all that difficult, was tedious slow work. I used a product by Woodland Scenics, in fact ten or eleven pouches of the material!! To make each clump, I picked up a small bundle of grass, generally between 1/16” and 1/8” diameter, twisted it tight at a center point, then quickly doused with a generous blob of fine odorless CA. Once dried, I cut the bundle in half, and voila, two clumps of grass. Sounds easy enough right? Well, it takes about an hour per bag of grass, and along the way you will have coated your thumb and forefinger with CA several times… perfect. I used an old mechanical pencil to punch holes into the foam base, and plugged in each grass clump. The good news about using the CA/grass combo is the area that is glued becomes a bit like a hard spear, so it’s pretty easy to stick into the base. Next, more paint was added to the base highlighting the trail alignment and a few places without grass – a couple of shades of light tan – a light dusting, not heavy. Finally I hand glued and placed lots of scale-looking stones, followed by a few layers of crushed rock and sand, glued in place with a blend of white glue and water. The last layer of sand and debris is really good at making the place where the grass clump is plugged into the base looks real.

The last adventure for this build came during taking photos of the final project. I like outdoor photos of projects, so outdoors I went. But, it was a rainy day – nonetheless, I carried on, and like the results. Wet trucks, landscape, gray sky, and all, worked out pretty well to represent the overcast that occurred the day of the actual event.