The setting is the originial location where I took pictures of the "real" truck in the early nineties : the port of Antwerp (Antwerpen in Dutch) where I live.
the setting will be a location at the docks : a huge slab of concrete in front of an old warehouse wall.
The concrete was scratched from an "Itong" building brick : one of those new-tech huge lightweight building bricks that are glued rather than cemented. The brick's texture is excellent to show scale concrete. I made a scale version of a 5 x 2.5 meters slab, including serial number and cracks. THen I cast a silicone mold and made several of these slabs using special hard plaster. I glued them all together on a wooden base, and filled the gaps with tile glue.
For the wall, I scribled every single (scale) brick of the wall into a similar (real) Itong building brick and also made a plaster copy.
The concrete is not yet painted, only primed.
The wall was primed, then sprayed black, then brick color. Then some bricks were highlighted, some were made a bit darker. When all was dry, I sprinkled dry tile cement over it and brushed it into the seems between the bricks with a broad make-up brush.
When the cement nicely filled the cracks and was cleared from the top of the bricks, I sprayed a thin film of water over it. That made the tile cement stay in the seems, and now it looks like a real brick wall.
I already made a rusty rainpipe that will be glued to the wall later.
Now comes the good part.
To make it all look like the port of Antwerp in real life, and add a story to the diorama, I'll paint a set of Graffity tags, throwups and pieces on the wall. Like on real life port buildings.
One of the tags is from a kid named "Chaos". The wall also shows "Chaos Rules !", the title of the diorama. Now like many real taggers, Mr Chaos doesn't only paint walls : he paints EVERYTHING that enters his territory. And since the US army parked an M35 awaiting shipment to the Gulf area, that M35 got a nice tag on its cabin too.
I'll complete the diorama with one, two or three MP's that come to inspect the scene of the "crime". Since the Chaos tag will be on the wall as well as the truck, the dio will be quite self-explaining.
I am now in the process of placing the tags on the wall. I found thousands on the internet (try http://l3221.free.fr/welcome.php for size if you want to get a flavor of what I'm doing).
Before I put a huge tag on my M35, I'd like your input. Is this a nice idea or would it be a "sin" to ruin the camo of my M35 ?
