The Diorama Base
The base was a made to order piece of
MDF from Paul at JustBases. I built up
the rear banks with some foam pieces
cut to suit and ixed in place with my
hot glue gun. These were then edged
with some plasticard and then it was
all blended to the base with some
household plaster mix. Whilst still wet I
laid some track marks around the base
using the original kit tracks and placed
a few small stones and a couple of tree
stumps from Great North Roads into
position. Now I was ready to start adding
some colour. I airbrushed a mixture of
dark earth and sand tones across the
base until I was happy and then started
a series of dark brown washes to bring
out all the detail. When all this was dry, I
began adding the irst layer of PVA glue
across the raised banks and applied
some natural forest scatter sourced
from the local woods. This was crushed
up nice and ine and over a couple of
evenings multiple layers were built up to
give a nice thick jungle loor. With all that
set I could start adding the mixture of
jungle plants which would really set the
scene. These came from a recent model
show and seem to be a mix of plastic
wargame and aquarium plants. Once
painted up and given a dark green wash
they looked pretty good. Appropriate
holes were pushed into the base and
the plants were ixed in position with
PVA glue. To supplement these and ill
in some of the smaller gaps I turned to
some laser cut paper plants from MIG
Productions. The range includes ferns,
palm leaves, creepers and jungle lowers
and though not cheap, when made up
and put in place they look very good.
With the jungle backdrop inished I
made a inal decision on placing all the
elements together and ixed everything
in position with two-part epoxy. The
Tiger itself was ixed with a nut and boltthrough the hull and base to really pull it
down and give a sense of weight. A few
touch ups here and there, some inal
small details were added and this one
was then complete!
All these elements eventually came
together on the inished diorama to
produce what I think is quite a busy,
unique and interesting scene. This was
a very rewarding project and was of
course great fun to put together.WWW.SAMPUBLICATIONS.COM 79diorama
Jungle Tiger