Thanks Pat. Äh, the composition on that diorama.
Not the easiest to come up with innit? it's sort of like making your bath at an okay temperature while having 4 taps.
-the Albatross tap
-the Alexander tap
-the Anatoli tap
-the boat tap.
Now the boat is easy to position as I already cut it according to its final position.
But now something about it is VERY important: 12 mm of it will be below the water level, so that i can get enough transparency with the body etc.
As there is some slope about the way the boat is on the water that will mean there will be less of the boat visible.so more sea and this will change a lot the VERTICAL balance.
Now is Alexander too much to the right? maybe not if there is some sea wave occupying some space on the right.
Then, is Anatoli not enough to the left? this is actually the one that worries me the most. And then the Albatross must not be outside the action. Actually he must be like an angle of death above the 2 corpses. So i absolutely must placing him at the right position -*between* them on a top position?
And then we are speaking of right or left, but that's according to the fact we consider the diorama from a "front" point of view, what about viewed from each side? and in between each side? It's SO complex to do the balance of a diorama because it must work either vertically or horizontally and basically from each and every angle you can think of.
So the final position will really decide by the end of the work but thanks for all suggestions Pat.

Thanks Primož -can't wait to see what you will do with your ice on the stream

Looks like my compressor troubles are over. Here is the boat with some basic airbrush work.
I will try to work on light. The front of the boat will be white slowly fading to a more yellowey colour. Most of the rear areas will be of a mix of grey and purple.
You can't seem much the yellowey colour with my terrible camera. believe they are there.
The reason why I didn't glued ion place neither the Romanov eagle and the letters is because they've been airbrushed in gold elsewhere.

So here is the first part of the shadows weathering, the more down, the darker the purple shade will be -remember 12mm will be under the water in the end too.
I didn't work at all the most exposed part of the hull, just the purple shadows on the back of the boat, and I still didn't work the finer details. that's still WIP if you prefer

nice work JB-uh-I mean Jenseits

Arf, Thanks Mike
Second part of the global painting and weathering, the "clear parts".
Indeed the "front" side will benefit from an early morning sunlight.
thanks to my new glowing compressor (actually it's a 20 years old one bought second hand), some really nice effects were done in 2 mn.
All the run offs were done by hand though. They are darker where the sun does don't shine so much while just being a bit of yellowish red near the place where the lettering will be glued.
The technique I used is to wet the hull and then applying layer after layer of thinned down acrylics.

Nicolas, my friend ,
AWESOME is all I can say at this point in time !!!!! Like JBA, you make the scene both eye-catching and provocative !!! WELL DONE !!! Looking forward to the next steps in the vignette. Cheers !
Kenneth .

Thanks Kenneth friend -I also hope to see your next project soon enough

Gold and brown for bouteilles..

I really like the subtle build up of colour here Nicolas.

Extremely well done...the concept, construction, and now the painting.

rick

thank you Pat, you know some pics are deceptive here: it took me as much time to paint the hull like this than to glue and weather those bloody golden letters

That's really appreciated Rick. i hope by the end you will say "...and the painting of the figs and the sea"'
well at least i hope.

You know what's good with mosquitoes? the nets are good.
That's an old 70's era net i found in some corner of the home. it's amazingly efficient to create the net I needed for my boat

Now this material proved to be quite tricky to glue but in the end i got there. i will paint it tonight, as well as prepare the right amount of string and "rigging"

Pure inspiration...

Yes, great work to make the PE-parts and it´s always very interesting to see a project "goes on"!
I like "in progress"-pictures, because they show parts of the real hard work.
Perhaps I also should do this with my "venusian" projects.

greetings...
Soeren

Thanks Francisco, I also really do appreciate the inspiration of your dioramas, there are few to match your talent, whatever the scale.

To this Soeren i say "yes". Do, some build logs. Of course as you mauy n otcie, i don't get an answer everytime I post something, but i'm still happy to get a few hundreds of visits everyday, in think that's very motivating, and I tend to work better if i know people are looking behind my shoulder.
I would strongly suggest you disembark your venusians in some place situated close enough to Tsushima II, Ogaden etc.

My posts will move at a slower pace from now on because i can't see myself post daily while I will paint those figs so basically i will post again when those are finished.
In the meantime a first picture which shows the net once painted.
Of interest is the array of colours I use below the boat; i know those places are dedicated to all kind of techniques involving women hair products, hand mixed pigments and stuff like that, but well my rugged Russian boat just needs to look like it stayed unmoving in the water for a coupla days, so no extravagant chipping because too much weathering distracts the viewer eh.
My painting technique just involves a dead CD and some Valejo paints that i actually mix together as well as some water.

Here is a blured picture showing the acrylic undercoat for the figs. thsoe will be painted in oils.

Thanks for the answer ... and the figures are very good!

I made build-logs of my (now completed) dioramas; they can be found on the kit-maker network. (one here on armorama, the other one at modelgeek)
Also one of them is a "multiple-build". (three time the same base-kit with 3 different results/ versions)

But my problem was, that perhaps I made too much images and perhaps they don´t show the neccessary parts. But perhaps... the "try and error" can help other readers to solve their problems.

greetings and thanks for motivation!
Soeren

Yo Nicolas,

Stunning build! Wath a scratchwork you show here...masterfull.

You're colors are magnificent, they truly are, great job on that.

Looking forward to the next update.

Greetz Nico

Thanks Soeren
I will try and check your own build logs shortly.

Thanks Nico. The sea should be of a nice white blue shade too


Here are the figs, painted in 3 short evenings.
Anatoli Solonitisn

Alexander kaidanovski

I have been building a plastic box,so that I can later put the resin in it. That's epoxy resin I'm using so there is not the usual heat problem like there could be with the polyester one.

Thanks to A.D. for printing me with his colour printer that Russian flag. He managed to a perfect recto-verso.
I bent it with the fingers and strengthened it using CA glue. Then I painted it of course -actually the original printing is there to provide both the outlines of the cross and a colour background.

...And there goes the original balance problem I got, at least partly

Great Composition Nico
I like some much
Congrats
Seb

wow! and did I read somewhere that you were concerned about your figures?
This one is stunning and reminds me very much of a close friend's work.
I find inspiration thumbing through this thread at every turn.
Waiting to see the water!
Cheers,
Charles

Hello Jenseits.
Outstanding. I wasn't sure with your previous mock up, but now I can see it, that's pretty cool.

Thank you Seb, appreciated

Thank you Charles, well for the figures i begin to have a bit of practise so they are not as much a problem as they used to be. Now my painting could be a lot better.
The water will decide everything, that's the real gambling.
My main fear would be *a resin drop on the boat or on a fig*, or that the water level would be too high compared to what I want to show.

Thanks Alex, indeed the flag just shwos an additional direction line that adds a lot. i will have to put too much of tint on the resin so that the transparency works at 100%

Time to attach Anatoli to his fate.
Thanks to a good friend, i finally found some really good rigging thread for my dios, so here i am trying to attach the hand to the hull

it looks simple, well it was NOT. As I really had to calculate the final position of the guy and really glue the stuff in place with no chance of being able to change the final setting, so what you see here won't be changed.
So now, let's put a bit of resin.. A darker shade for the right and top side of the picture, a blue and lighter shade for the rest.
Actually my plastic box was mostly "water" proof.
Every layer will take a whole day to set, there is at least 6 in the pipeline sheesh.
the dio won't be finished before a week I fear.

Outstanding!
I trust we will get photographs of each pour of the resin so we can see the daily progress?


C.

Hi Nicolas,
A bit of a belated welcome to KitMaker. I don't often get the chance to read the forums these days, but I am happy to have seen and read this topic as your work is really amazing to see come together. I look forward to seeing the rest of the process.

Best wishes,
Jim

Great work Nicolas,
This is really a superbe tutorial on a lot of aspects of dio making.

Cheers
Claude

Yep Charles, that's indeed the plan! The second coat pic will be tomorrow though

Thank you Jim for saying hello, I hope the outcome will be worth your trust

Thanks Claude, still its quite a short tutorial, i can't believe there will be only 4 or 5 posts left before the completion of the scene -it's sure unlike the years long tutorials of some

So well, Now i have a dilemma. You know how some people use some blade or anything to raise the water to do some waves. Well, you can't do that with epoxy because of the drying time. Whatever you do, the waves fall flat in a rather pitiful way.
So what to do?
Well, let's model the waves in a form and then put the waves on the top of the flat sea. we'll see how it goes

First another plastic box, and let's put some plaster in it with gentle waves sculpted


Let's trim the plaster (without breaking anything, not this time though!)


Trim and put some other much diluted plaster coat on the top so that everything is really smooth. Some plasticine form and let's put some silicon over those waves

[ JBA giving Jenseits a hand on this particularly tricky bit of water]
Here is the silicon form after it dried I managed to take a picture with the light coming from the side so you guys can see the details -please notice my own camera is better than Nico's.

I have been greasing the form with kitchen oil and put some lightly tinted resin in it. And here are the ready made waves