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When I wake I'm still in a dream
In most men dreams I suppose you will find dolls running through fields late at night after men like in those films from the 70's. I suppose this is the case for me too, but the dolls tend to be ghosts from my past, who take many shapes and befriend the creatures that haunt the rusty landscapes of my dioramas.
Generally speaking I would say that wherever the man built and destroyed, left and came back you will find a part of me and a fertile ground for my imagination.
But then throughout this rusty mess some big light burst came in and terrorised my pet ghosts: my wife and I got a baby!!
So here came the tiny thing and there went our sleep as fast as light. From as far as I remember I always had some troubles to make a difference between dream and reality it really got worse since that moment. So almost daily at sunset this spring and summer I put the laundry on the wire between the two old rusty poles that separates our small garden and the one of the neighbours listening to calm music at loud volume in my headphones –with the sun in the eye too- and one day both my worlds collided and I saw myself putting the laundry on the gun cradle of a boat, with both rusty poles being replaced one way by a funnel and the other one by a rusty boat mast.
And I fell like I had no choice than doing a diorama out of this. (pic 1)
Sokol
The idea was just so clear it didn’t take me much time to come with decent plans. The same evening those were drawn. They showed the upper structure of a boat, and some groundcover just like if the boat had stranded and broke underwater in some marshes.
But then I didn’t know at first where to set up the action nor which boat to use.
Since 2 years i show my stuff on internet I have been asking many questions, received many answers, was pointed to many links which allowed me to build a comfortable stash of reference concerning early Russian XXth century material in which I set up to find the right boat.
The main issue I had to take care of was the funnel. It shouldn’t be as big as it would dwarf the figure standing near it. This alone limited my choices to some kind of torpedo boat as destroyers’ funnels were certainly too big. Then i remember last year meeting a Finnish modeller who was into immerse into his country’s naval history. He sent me some pictures of his work –but also a great picture he owned showing the close up of the gun cradle of a torpedo boat of the Sokol class. Now searching a bit deeper, I managed to find some book about Sokols which was of help when it came to plans but which only showed some general view of the boat. Those would be certainly enough to create a 1/700 model but a bit bad for bigger scales. Nonetheless I set up for a Sokol thanks to that one and great close up picture I was given.
Furthermore, some profiles in the book as well as a picture I was sent showed a particular ship of the class which was painted green which could prove useful as I never showed any enthusiasm towards the XXth century mostly grey colour of ships.
So what were Sokols? The name means “falcon” in a lot of eastern European languages. The real Sokol was built in England for the tsar by Yarrow, and was later copied more or less brilliantly by Russian arsenals. A good dozen (?) were built, a few sank during the Russo-Japanese war, some others were used as minesweepers during World War One –the Finns managed to pick up a few for their own navy when they gained their independence in 1920, and the rest was finally scrapped during the 1920’s.
This is one of those, dragged from the sea coast to a marsh and let rusted. It could almost be an accurate scene.
The challenge
I just can’t start a new diorama if there is no real challenge for me to start with.
But this proved not really hard to find.
You know what’s pretty hard to model when you want to scratchbuild those kind of early XXth century warships? The main guns a well as the rear one stand on some large metal surface pierced with hundreds of holes.
I remembered gloomily of the pictures my Finn friend sent me of his own handsome 1/48 Sokol model and had a look at his pierced gun cradle only to realize he did all the holes by himself using a drill.
I don’t have the patience to work like this so i had to think of an easier way which would guarantee some even holing scheme.
Then I wanted to create a marsh and got to remind a childhood memory I am very fond of. Some flooded old Gaul quarry near my hometown where we used to bath, whose water was so pure we could have a look at the fish way below our feet.
So I decided the water would be see through and that yet, when we would have a look to the diorama from its side, the water would be of a nice blue/green shade just like it would be in a normal bit of still water.
Last but not least, i wanted to work further idea that a diorama should show the direction of the light. I set up against for those warm colours you get at sunset. Here the light would come almost horizontally and bath most of vertical surfaces. I was aware right since the start that the diorama would work best viewed from one specific angle, but yet the point would be that different colours schemes would be available if the viewer chooses to have a look from unexpected angles.
The guns
I was afraid that I were about to start the holed gun cradle, I would trash the whole project at the first downside if things would turn nasty.
So i had to begin the diorama with something easy enough to build and yet challenging enough to sustain my motivation in harder times.
I decided I would start with the guns.
The small one would be a 37 mm Hotchkiss single barrelled gun. It was built by the French society Hotchkiss around 1890 and sold throughout the world as both a land gun and a naval piece of artillery (used by the British as the One Pounder).
It was of course sold to Russia around 1890 so that it could be mounted on most of their ships. After the Russo-Japanese war, this close combat gun was removed from the larger ships and stayed only on River monitors as well as PT boats. I really wanted to model this one because I sensed it was pretty easy to make and then I had a ton of good quality plans at disposal.
The first step was the barrel that I cut from a brass tube I bought in a RC shop. I glued an evergreen cylinder of a larger section at the big end of the tube, put some Magic Sculp on the tube and rolled gently the mastic covered brass on a very flat surface .
Then I modelled the bore of the gun out of Magic Sculp: I did a square shape and let it dry. Then I carved a depression with a cutter on the top of the bore and drilled the opening.
The trigger was created out of some old photoetch set that I bent around a needle. I then added the grip and some further detailing under the gun with small plasticard bits.
Once this was done, I started with the gun mount. First I cut a hole in a thin plasticard sheet to create this opening in the mount whose usefulness escapes me (maybe an ashtray of sorts?)
I cut 2 circles of plastic at the right size -one of the top, one for the bottom of the mount- and a bit of plastic tubing of the size of the height of the mount. Then I glued the whole while bending the soft plasticard. If the handle was easily done by cutting plasticard at the right dimension, the barrel handling was more difficult to figure out.
First I let dry completely a Magic Sculp strip, then I glued 2 small bits of evergreen tubing. I fixed on the top of the whole 2 other strips of semi-hardened Magic Sculp. Keep in mind that the difficulty is to keep all the angles straight which means the mastic must be dry enough to do that -and yet smooth enough to be bent. (pic 2 – 3 -4)
The big gun is the 75mm Canet naval gun, another French export that you can see as main gun on most Russian torpedo boats and destroyers towards the beginning of the XXth century.
Now if I had no problem to find at least 4 different plans, the trouble was they all showed a different gun and gun mount, and that none really recoup any of the pictures I got.
There is one which i really wanted to make which bore a very complicated sighting system –that particular model is on display at the St Petersburg Artillery Museum but there was too few pictures available on internet for me to really understand the weak quality corresponding plans I got. (btw, if someone from Russia/St Petersburg reads this, I still want several other pictures of the Canet gun on display there for further projects!).
Finally after some enquiry in a forum I was sent some good pictures taken on the Russian cruiser Rossia which show a rather squat mount which wasn’t corresponding to the thin and round mount I could make out from my small Sokol picture library. But on one picture I found I could bet that the mount was the same as Rossia’s, so as I also had a corresponding plan, I decided to go for it.
It looks kind of hard like that, but really, most of the job in those bigger guns is to cut the brass and plastic tubes at the right dimensions. (pic 5)
I first built the tube by putting a small bit of aluminium tube of the right diameter at the end of the plastic tube –the respective thickness of both material proved ideal here for the construction. Then again, I applied some Magic Sculp and rolled the tube on a glass surface. When the whole dried, I sanded thoroughly so that no joint would be visible. (pic 6)
Most of the lower part of the gun was done using the same technique. The mount was fairly easy to do too, using mostly bent length of plastic and cutting out some thicker evergreen sheets to create all the contact surfaces between every element. The wheels were done out of cut plastic tubing. (pic 7 - 8).
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