Old-school Tamiya

[Jakko]

After cutting out the pieces of rubble from the foam board, I could glue them in place:



I also glued some wood, that I had cut a sharp side to and cut into blocks, along the edge of the crater. Once the glue on all of these had dried, I used a small spatula to apply wall filler over and between the rubble and around the outside of the crater:



That's a fairly involved job, it turns out, and I found that the paper templates for the rubble came off the smooth card of the foam board very easily, so I took them all off to prevent the filler from coming loose too easily later on. I further smeared filler all over the ground inside the ruin and textured it with an old, stuff paintbrush:



Now I'll leave this to dry before I continue with the inside of the crater and the road. The back of the wall will remain as it is, BTW, I'm not going to sand it smooth.

 

[Jakko]

Continuing with the crater and the road:



As you can tell from the slightly darker colour, the filler is still wet here. I made the tracks in it like this:



Put a piece of cling film over it and then press the tracks in using the model. I made the other lines with a spatula.

 

[BarleyBop]

press the tracks

Great walk-through, especially for those of us who haven't ever worked through a dio build.

 

[Jakko]

It's been a long time since I built an actual diorama Probably fifteen years or so? Oh, wait, I can look that up from the dates on some photos. OK, it turns out to be 21 years Since then I have built some wargames terrain and, in the last year or so, a few display bases, though.

 

[Jakko]

Finally, there's colour on the diorama! After doing a little research into typical colours for buildings in North Africa, I painted a coat of Tamiya XF-57 Buff all over the walls and rubble:



Once that had dried, I could vary the colour a bit:



For this, I took some colours from my acrylic paint drawer almost at random, as long as they were a paler tan than the base colour, What you can see in the photo above is only three colours, which I applied one at a time using a fairly big (ca. 7 mm diameter), "blunt" brush, in random splotches. Don't drybrush, just use the paint wet but don't put too much on your brush. Make sure the splotches are irregular in shape and don't have any sharp edges, and don't be afraid to smear out and/or fade the paint with the tip of one of your fingers (possibly moistened by licking it). Don't wait until the previous paint is dry here — though that may be easier said than done with acrylic paint

To the broken parts of the wall (and the whole back of it), I applied Italeri brown wash, straight from the bottle:



That had to dry a little longer, but after that I drybrushed all of the broken parts with Tamiya Buff, and then drybrushed all of the broken bits and all edges and corners with the lightest of the colours I also used on the wall. Next, I mixed that 1:1 with white and drybrushed all of that again, and finally, did that a third time with a 1:2 mixture of that colour and white. Everything together, the building now looks like this:

 

[Belugawrx]

Very convincing old stucco/plaster wall technique..will save that in the memory bank (2thumsup)

 

[Steve Ski]

This is the fun part, Jakko, Ruck On!

 

[BarleyBop]

splotches

Nice effect... like where you're going with this.