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Diorama or Bust

Introduction

My purpose is to explore how much closer to Realism it’s possible to get. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion and there is no right or wrong because a hobby is personal. For me, if the whole aim of model-making & dioramas is to “make it look like the real thing”, the final step of that process ought to be photography that doesn’t detract from that aim.

Just so that I’m not misunderstood, there is definitely a place for dioramas which are true vignettes i.e. you can see the edges of the base. There are countless superb examples on this site and elsewhere. What I’m suggesting is that there should also be a place for a kind of war-photography diorama, but I don’t know what to call it – any ideas?

I started on this project nearly 20 years ago, depicting episodes in the northern salient battles of Kursk in July 1943 - don’t ask me why as I’m still not sure. To date there are around 60 vehicles and 190 photos & counting. The overall shape of my portfolio is going to be around 20 albums, each containing around 10 images depicting a particular place on a certain day during the main 10 days of hostilities in and around Ponyri near Orel on the northern edge of the Kursk battles.

So here’s a selection of images to date from various albums, and some notes follow below on how it all came together.

Diorama bases

They needed to be light for frequent portability outdoors (because natural light is essential) so I made buckets full of papier-mache (shredded newspaper + some gloops of wallpaper paste + water + sweat) and landscaped it (no more than 2 inches thick) on sections of melamine/formica slabs. Drying time varied so I sprayed a solution of household disinfectant to prevent mould. When dry – warped and shrunken a bit – I peeled them off and glued them onto sections of plywood/mdf braced for rigidity. Using a much thinner and runnier top layer of papier-mache I could then imprint tank tracks which barely shrank at all.

Last step was a sprayed thickish solution of PVA glue (save the air-brush, use any domestic cleaning bottle with a spray action) and sprinkled sieved soil onto it, with a more dilute final spray to fix it.

Foliage

The eternal problem is grass –smoking it doesn’t relieve the frustration for long. After many failures the only thing that worked for me was a 2nd-hand Gras-Master I found in on EBay in Austria about eight years ago. It’s an electrical device that looks like a small hair-dryer, you fill the hopper with (say) half-inch cut lengths/sheafs of filaments of the packets of grass found in railway sections of model shops or on the net, attach a trailing wire to the diorama, spray PVA glue over a patch of ground and drop/shake the filaments onto it. They magically land on their ends and stay stood up in an electrostatic field long enough for the glue to dry enough. It’s tricky and takes practice but the result can be outstanding. Over time the grass tends to droop, revivable with a few zaps from the device. Most of my crops have been trampled beyond redemption but that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Trees and leaves are dried samples from local botanical expeditions; I can’t tell you what anything was called except some kinds of miniature Rockery shrubbery can be a good source of in-scale “leaves”. Repeated sprays of PVA glue and sprinklings of leaves on twiglets build up to a reasonable tree, finished off with air-brush sprays of (acrylic) shades of green and/or brown.

Buildings

MiniArt, extemporised with walls made of thin (quarter-inch ideal) polystyrene packing (stiffened with thin balsa sheet for the interior walls) covered with a layer of plaster or gap-filler into which (while wet) I pressed a home-made “grid” make a brick pattern. To do that I made a bunch of to-scale bricks, glued them onto a backing-plate with slightly projecting sheet-styrene where the mortar would be. I tended to do sections as long as the wall but only about 5-bricks wide at a time. More home-made bricks can be used for the rubble and broken edges. I’m a big balsa fan, sheets and strips for everything else: window frames, doors, floorboards, rafters, it’s easy to use, paint, smash up, strong when it needs to be yet light as a feather.

Vehicles and figures

They’re mostly identifiable by manufacturer in the photos, but I can identify on request. Only two of the 60-odd kits have full interiors - the old Academy Tiger, and the T34 wreck (AFV Club version with the transparent armour) which took intermittently over 18 months of sanity-testing to finish. I only do after-market if it’s going to make a difference in the photos i.e. not that much, and I loathe figure-painting so let’s move right along.

Research

Somewhat important if reality is the goal, probably two-thirds of my kits are based on specific documented originals, the rest are approximated to the extent that it’s unlikely anyone can prove me wrong, and where differences of opinion rage because there’s no defining proof then I have to weigh the arguments. For example, were sPzAbt 505’s Tigers at Kursk camouflaged with just green, or just brown, or both? I made my choice on the evidence available – which meant a complete re-paint because I’m not afraid to change my mind or be corrected.

Photography

A fancy camera isn’t necessary – I just point’n’shoot my baby Olympus ($205 in 2008) on full automatic, no flash. Because I’m trying to replicate variable and often poor quality WW2 photography anything more would be pointless, as is Photoshop et al. Either the image stays “clean” or it gets deleted and re-shot, the only modifications I make are to tweak tone/contrast or try some out in glorious black & white.

The pyrotechnical images are well below optimum definition because there’s no way I can be that quick on the draw (or blast-proof) with a stills camera, so the old Sony Handycam braves the shrapnel. Once clips are uploaded I turn single frames into jpegs. The quality is screwed in the transfer process but I haven’t seen much actual combat photography where there was time to set up a tripod and get the right lens/exposure settings ready for the moments of random detonation.

Meteorology is key, it can be on your side when a nice convergence of conditions occurs. And then it can be the bane of the project, even in Sydney where it’s beautiful every day, right? Apart from rain, even a light breeze can scuttle a session because I don’t secure the figures, they have to stand on their own two feet or they don’t get the gig. I shoot on an upstairs balcony partly overlooking the city with a big sky, but it took an embarrassingly long time to work out that by tipping up the diorama platform (a picnic table) by around 10 degrees at the leading edge, the modern skyline neatly disappeared from view and gave me a much wider background field. The downside (literally!) is that the grunts fall over all the time, usually 0.25 seconds before the camera shutter opens and this is one of several reasons why I don’t have any hair left on the top of my head.

Last but the opposite of least, framing is where I try to make it count – it’s has to be 1/35th-Man’s viewpoint every time, because they weren’t flying many hot-air balloons over the Kursk salient in July 1943.

General

The cost of kits has always been a concern so I made it a policy to use minimal-cost dioramic materials. Apart from what’s already mentioned, another example is kids’ powder paint - ideal for painting balsa, turning tissue paper into tarps and camouflage covers (dab on gently with a soft brush), mud washes on vehicles, and used dry it makes great dust – keep the pastels for artwork. Apart from getting good photography results, I get a kick out of adapting often unlikely household materials; if a hobby isn’t fun it’s not worth it.