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Liberty Ship

The LCM(3) is a Trumpeter kit and the jeep being lowered is a Tamiya kit including the figure in the jeep. The rest of the figures come from various brands in resin. I must say it is hard to find figure kits for naval diorama’s, so I improvised a little in the painting to give them some navy feel, well some of them. The water effects, the rigging and climbing netting, and everything else really was all scratch built to give the impression of the ship in the photo I used for inspiration. Of course I took some liberties where I had to as I didn’t want the diorama to get any larger as it is pretty large as is at 24.5 inches long, 15 inches wide, and about 23 inches to the top of the crane. (I really am going to have to look for a spot to display this) The ship hull is a piece of metal I shaped and scored to give the impression of the panels on a real ship and then I added plenty of wear with various effects by AK interactive and oil paints. I cut the portholes out of the sheet metal and used some grommets to give the depth to the portholes. The top of the railing is wood and the decking material is also wood. Most of the superstructure is styrene supported by wood so that it could handle the weight of the crane which is a metal tube. A lot of the details were gathered through You Tube videos of tours people had done on liberty ships in the US and Greece. They were super helpful as I have no idea about Navy rigging or ship layout. This obviously isn't super accurate in terms of layout and dimension but I think it captures the feeling pretty well. The cargo net I also attempted on my own its some serious knotting going on, I recommend to try it its quiet challenging to get it right. Not that mine is well done but its passable for now, I may upgrade in future, the ones from Thachweave products are nice but I wanted to try my own hand at it first. The water is acrylic paint with lighting plastic over it which gives a nice wave affect to it in person, I don’t know if the photos do it justice. Not perfect by any means, I really agonized over the water as there are a bunch of techniques to replicate water but they are all tough to get right, in the end I am happy with this approach for this diorama.