Dave O''Meara announces the winner of the Armorama.com AMPS 2007 International Award: James Wechsler''s diorama "The Hard Way".

Armorama.com AMPS 2007 Award



If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Excelent job!!!!

WOW!!!! What a SUPER job!!!!!!

Speechless!

Rob

Fantastic dio!!

Is that the DML Gen2 figure set?

Rudi

Wow thats amazing.
how do you do that water?

Wow! Excellent job.

The only thing that struck me was that the Shermans should have been more wet and shiny above the water line due the waves etc. Like the drum on the beach. However, that does not distract from the diorama being excellent.

How did you do the water?

Thanks for sharing

Congratulations, Mr. Wechsler, and my comments echo my site mates, great job overall...very nice dio, great action...thanks for the experience, Dave!
Cheers,
~Gunny

Jim and I spoke about this very issue. He said from photographs he had and writings of tankers who made the wade into shore, the surf remained mostly off of the tank's upper hull. Jim is a great stickler for detail (as if you can't tell) and he modelled the "dryness" according to his best research.

BTW, that historical point was not taken into account and cost him in the eyes of some of the judges that day sadly. Ahh, such is life. Jim continues to literally crank models and dioramas out constantly. He posts most of his work over on TL.

Amongst Jim's other entries at the AMPS Show was also the winner of the "Fish Tanks" theme award: he modelled a great M4A3 amphibian , swimming along during the Okinawa invasion.

HTH, RC

THIS IS AMAZING!

How did you do the water.

Here is Jim's own write up and more pictures:

http://www.track-link.net/gallery/4994

Thanks for the nice comments. Special thanks to Armorama for hosting the 'Best Sherman' award.

Here's the answers to a few of the questions in the posts above.

All of the figures except the guy throwing the hand grenade are the Dragon Gen 2 figures. There's the four in the kit and I made a 5th from the left over parts and a set of legs in my spares bin.

I made the water using a product called Envirotek Lite. You can find it in art supply stores (in the US, Michaels carries it). It is lightly tinted with Tamiya acrylics. The white water is made from the white top of a kitchen sponge. The sufrace is made up from home silicone caulking (the water soluable kind) and the whole thing is coated in a product called Acrylic Varnish, also available in the art supply store.

The note about the tanks being wetter is accurate. In retrospect I wish I'd made a darker section that was glossy wet but it was too hard to do once fully mounted and to be honest, I was afraid I'd wreck the whole thing.

Jim

Jim

Congrats Jim!

Well deserved

Cheers, Michael