Saturday 26 October 2013

Battle of Berlin vignette, Part 2

Right, time to start detailing the backdrop for my ISU-122 vignette. As said, I'm not going into a lot of research for this - I just want something that looks like a generic 'bombed out' building. I know I want it to look like it's the shell of a building, well just a wall really, and that I want rubble spilling through the gaps in the wall.

First thing was to start adding some of the architectural details, nothing fancy and everything was quick to apply. The bricks are from a HO/OO model railway texture sheet (dirt cheap)...


The lintels and window sills are all just off-cuts from some plastics strips I had - all pretty straight forward. BUT - at this stage I started to get a little ambitious (always a bad thing) and fancied peppering the walls with bullet holes, so I did go looking for some reference material and found this...


Having seen a few Berlin WW2 period building now I realised that they all seemed to have plaster cladding facades, not brick as I originally intended. This is bad and good, the down side is it will mean a little more work, the good side is that if I clad my wall I can jab holes in the cladding to make more realistic bullet holes.

What I decided to do was this - I used some very thin sheets of plasticard to cut a top layer which will be glued onto my brickwork, BUT I have cut random holes in this layer so you can see the brickwork THROUGH this layer...

(You will notice that I added some broken window frames and some shutters behind the lower floor windows. Easy but adds extra realism.)

A bit messy, but that doesn't matter as it's supposed to be messy!


Now, I fix the wall to my diorama base and I'll just pop on my ISU-122 to check scale and placement...


Yep, that looks OK...And so, it's on to adding the rubble!

3 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Many thanks Paul! The hardest part is trying not to get carried away. It's so easy to start to want to add additional architectural stuff when doing a building, the temptation is terrible! :)

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  2. Excellent stuff, Stephen, this is first class scratch-building! I'm also planning a small Berlin diorama for my IS-2, so I'm most interested to see your progress, and maybe steal some ideas :-)
    Cheers!

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