Illustration by Alex Kaiserine
More to come very soon.

Got my ticket!!

Greetz Nico

Allways first uh Nico?

This summer I read that thing:


It's some sort of insane 700 pages+ work on the air war in the South Pacific.
Lots of erudition, reasonably entertaining, reasonably flag waving.

Anyway, page 218 he cites one Matome Ugaki, one of those guys that wasn't so interetsed in living through a post-war japan.

"[Yamamoto] was found on the seat outside of the plane, still gripping his sword. It hadn't decomposed yet and was said to be in a state of great dignity. He must really have been superhuman"

That's what got me, superhuman admiral griping his sword, in a state of great dignity... Saintlike

Okay I am in..

Thanks for this Juan friend!
yes I advocate the dangerous dioramas and the fatal outcomes !
Seriously other dioramas are sooo Bourgeois

Okay so I am going to sculpt Admiral Yamamoto in 1/35. How does it sound?

Pretty bad to be honest because if the figure I sculpt DOESN'T LOOK LIKE Yamamoto, you can really laugh all the way to this forum's next thread.

So well, better begin with the sculpting of dear Isoroku. because if I can't manage to get him right I will stop right there..

So first let's crawl internet in search for pictures. The best I found were
here -ww2 database or something, good pics, too small as usual.
I printed them and realized that Yamamoto looked pretty short, that his body/head ratio was something like 6,5/1 which I have to remember while defining the proportions while sculpting. No oil painting but with a definite something about him that you can make through the pictures.

Anyway, here's a 10 mn job, just wire flexing and magic Sculp dressing


I always have some troubles with ending the clothes with magic Sculp this is why I devise to make the tips of Duro because it can hold details better than Magic Sculp (though is certainly harder to use). i can make some very thin folds better this way


here's now the trousers as sculpted, as well as one of the arms.

Soon I will move towards more interesting stuff: Yamamoto's head.

Thanks Juan friend yes "mauvaise réputation", who cares anyway, I don't expose my dioramas.
Actually Yamamoto was ejected from the plane still strapped on his seat which explains the position of the body -I will have to do the seat afterwards.

So I kept on with the body, same thing as arms and legs, trying to do the end of the cliothes alright by using Duro..


Okay so here I am with my Yamamoto portraits, trying to make him like he is..
Notice a rather long thin nose, small lips, rather round eyes, big neck..


In the end (2 hours work) I got that!

There is a small gap in the nose that must be corrected with Mr Surfacer, the lips are a bit huge? not sure, this is small buisness.

Fixing the head on the body, adding a collar


At this stage there is a lot of trimming, filling to do, but not yet because Yamamoto was strapped on his seat. So better design the seat first, and after I will have to find a way to deal with those straps.

Salut Nicolas,

I think you did very well with the face.
I think also that the hands you choose looks perhaps a bit to stiff. I am not an expert on fingerpositionning of dead bodies and i did not want to replicate the position now here in my office, but the nearly pointing left hand.....well, it leaves me with some doubts.
Just a thought that you may check that again. Up to you, of course.

PS.: Nice banner! LOL

Salut

Claude

Good work at the mo'! nice face

merci JB, merci Claude, oui la bannière il faut que je l'enlève

Well the hand IS stiff, I still didn't made him grasp his sword -he is in a postion that would have him scream "chaaarge" if he was sit on a horse
Thanks for the input -buy a new van by the way

Hey Juan friend, please give the url video again as it's not the right one!
There is indeed 2 accounts of Yamamoto's death, yours that you gave, that he was he seemed hardly wounded and died from schock and this one (the follow sentences that I gave on my first post)

"A postmortem made while his body was being carried on a sub-chaser found two piercing machine-gun bullet wounds in his lower jaw and shoulder. He was probably killed instantly while in the air"

Thanks for the input

Aha thanks for the video juan! it's pretty funny!
There is a ton of inaccuracies in it -first there was only 2 Zeroes as an escort, then Yamamoto is dressed as an Army personnel while he was a navy Admiral! I will probably paint him a white uniform as his last known picture shown him in white.
I think the upper 20mm canon's rate of fire was lesser than what is shown too -and then no Lightning was destroyed during the engagement. Then there is also the fact that armor piercing bullets do a great deal of damages on someone, not a red stain on a green uniform.
Is the actor Toshiro Mifune? he looks very Yamamoto like, very handsome.
Thanks for sharing!

Nicholas, Your artistry, regardless of subject matter, fascinates me.

Not to be maudlin, however an armor piercing bullet will pass through the human body as if it was not there. That said it will kill, and does so superbly.

Sorry my friend, I spent too many years as a homicide investigator. Keep building, please.

G

Thanks again for the Movie Magic Juan friend! Ah well, so many versions of Yamamoto's death, since last time I had yet another one, which makes 4 of them!
I will sum these up when I have more time.
better choose what suits the diorama in an aesthetic way..

Thanks for your input Wayne! I have something here which I found Googling to death, it is Yamamoto's autopsy that was published at some point, complete with a picture of the dead great man

he indeed doesn't look like he got an armour piercing wound on the lower jaw like on the aforementioned report, so in truth my friend, I think it is wise to leave behind the Armour piercing bullet option

Well, let's leave Yamamoto for the moment to try and work on his surroundings.
First there will be a small part of a G4M wing on the diorama complete with a bit of rudder.
So of course finding a 1/35 Betty is out of the question so let's scratchbuild it.
plans are put to scale, some crossections are being worked on a vector based drawing software (either Inkscape or Illustrator) and glued on some .7thick plastic sheet.


let's glue those pieces together using that sort of "French" Tenax you find here

i need those being glued really hard because filling it with Magic Sculp is not that easy.
The 2 colours are Magic Sculp, the browner is the end of an old regular MS pot that was lying around and not fit anymore for Fig sculpting, the whiter one is some sort of thing I found on ebay which is called "Morezmore Magic Sculp", I really don't like the stuff, it's ultra sticky, doesn't set so well, so I spend my pot on stuff like that.
Honestly I'd wish to know why that stuff has the right to be called "Magic Sculp" while it's not really MS.

Nicolas, As I caught this thread originaly I kept thinking Yamamoto, this will be a big section of ship model. Now I see where you are going with it. Being able to watch yours and several other masters at work here is beautiful. From begining to end is a treat for me. I look forward to this build up and knowing that death is hard to portray on a (sensible level) where it is accepted by most, I have full confidence that you will pull this off with great style. His head is coming along very well in my opinion. I can see within, but to get it out and done in reality takes a good artist such as yourself. And if Trumpy is listening, a 1/35th betty would be way too cool. Thanks for sharing my friend.

very nice results on the face sculpting Nicolas. it is, in my opinion, the ultimate challenge to not only make a headsculpt in 1/35 scale but to attempt to make it look like someone in particular.

you have done very well indeed. look forward to following this project. cheers, mh.

hey Bob friend, you know I actually have that idea since a long time! doing the smallest Yamato diorama ever -when the big Japanese battleship sank, at one point there must have been a few inches coming out of the surface, why not modeling those?
yep death is hard to model, this is why i am interested, my latest one was slagged in some places for being bad taste but I don't regret it one bit of course. Let's see with this one!
A 1/35 Betty uh? we can always pray

thanks a million for all your help right since the start Juan friend

Thanks Bruce -I actually find out that's easier to sculpt a face with a solid base near you. Otherwise you sort of work out of memory and your fig ends up liking character. I hope to see some more of your work pretty soon too!

Anyway, a bit of autopromo, if you happen to be Czech and buy modeling mags, you have the numbers of august and September 2010 with my Tsushima II diorama in it, and a great work they've been doing on it too! I am overjoyed! I guess I'll get that in a French mag in another life


Back to my wing, here it is trying to put some lead foil on some conveniently placed holes

I deform and glue the lead foil (argh! it's impossible to find anymore), use some more Squadron putty, Mr Surfacer 500..

Here is oneof the rudders (I suppose it's the word?) with a bit of MS that i will apply on the underside of the thing..

Anyway here is my wing after I used that trumpeter rivet thing

this is not necessary true Juan friend, as Mig is ALSO king of Spain!

Okay now comes the seat, I happen to have some good reference for the back and side of it so it should be walk in the park -even though I am deprived of my usual homemade photoetch facilities.

let's cut plastic


let's glue plastic


now better fill, trim, arrange the shape with a pair of scissors..


Bits of old photoetch, Archer rivets (not small enough heck!) a bit of brass to do one of the 2 seat attachs underside, some Duro cover for the seat cover and that's it, Admiral Yamamoto fits nicely in it.



next step ground cover!

very nice detailing Nicolas. i find that there are good points about making things from plastic rather than brass. i keep telling myself this because i do not have the means to create PE brass at home right now.

love following your work and really appreciate the time you take to post such clear photos of the process. i enjoy it so much. cheers, bd.


PS: congratulations on your published work, i have read that magazine before though i cannot read the text. i, too would have liked it in french as i could then read it... maybe in my next life as well.

Thanks Bruce. Well to be honest, if I had a bigger fret to do I would have gone the homemade PE way.
One of the reasons I never build models is that I think the plastic's look and feel is soft. You can't have real straight angles with plastic. Everytime I see a model I think that. Have a look at JBA's Birds and notice how all the angles made of PE look real straight and I am after that. It may be really hard to notice but I still have that same feeling.
So maybe have a go at this one of these days, it's not that complicated nor real expensive..
Now these are old news, the exciting thing is those print a part resin thing!! Maybe I'll have a got at this one of these days!
Thansk also for the congratulations -Modelar is really well done, even if I don't have a clue what's written on it there is so much pictures that can sort of make up the text!

Back to my seat, a French forum's member told me there was some inaccuracy in the seat, that there should be some hole for the yoke to come. That was confirmed on Hyperscale -and somebody even told me Yamamoto was reported to be on the copilot's seat at the time of the crash which would be very convenient for my diorama erm..

well let's do that hole.
First let's remove all the "accessories" that would drop at some point like the arm thing., removing the stretched plastic bit that made sort of a ledge on the seat.
Applying a small plastic sheet on that special place proved to be a bit complicated, you cans ee here on the second pic how it is after one good mastic coat.


Oh joy! Doing that ledge back again!!


phew..


Here's an in situ picture. Some invisible work here: yamamoto was sort of flmat when I sculpted him, but of course the plane's wing is curved, so I have to sculpt back some bits of the underside, reposition legs and arms so that he could really go along those curves..