The water

There’s lots of literature on the internet and elsewhere to make and shape water using clear polyester resin, so I won’t add much except for one or two tricks about TINTS and LAYERING.

First, I would avoid the transparent colours to tint the resin except when modelling some lagoon or any other places where the water is supposed to be pure. I personally use some oil paints for tint. Always remember to use very little paint as the final result almost always appears to be darker and more opaque than what you can see in your mixing can. Second, use layering to make some fine blends of colours. To make this brown-blue gradient I poured two tinted parts of resin on either sides of the diorama at the same time. At the place were the tints meet the mix between the two shades will look a bit like a leopard skin. Never mind, just use some extra layers of slightly tinted resin above so the leopard skin effect slowly disappears.

To make those water effects (including the black part) I might have used six coats, including some slightly tinted white ones to clear the water’s colour and make the border colours disappear.

I made the water waves with some acrylic gloss medium, but remember this stuff can be a traitor, it retracts a lot when drying and I would also advise to use thin coats that are not thicker than 3mm to be sure the entire coat will actually dry while staying transparent. This acrylic medium is glossy but really not enough – in fact it looks terribly *plastic* so I added a big coat of Humbrol Clear Cote which also has the great advantage of hiding some small imperfections :).

Around the last layer of resin I spread some of these new Plus Model leaves over the water that I had painted previously. This stuff is just plain great but I won’t use anymore in the future, I think the price of these is certainly superior to gold, and you don’t get a lot in one of their small bags.



These are heavy modification of the « Stalin’s Kazaks 1943 » Alanger box. The set is decent and provides a neat base to carry on some work on Russian figures though a lot of work has to be done to clean the moulding edges.

So, as both are supposed to be patrolling near the shore, I supposed they must have left their shoes somewhere. So I cut the legs under the knee, found some feet in a Nemrod set and proceeded to sculpt legs.

As in normal life people are more or less tall, some with wide shoulders some with hairy feet etc, I decided to make the cap wearing soldier quite tall with longer legs and to slightly broaden the helmet one’s shoulders with some extra Miliput.
I replaced the hands and heads with Hornet replacement parts. There was a slight problem though – though I tried the Russian caps that you can find in ICM boxes and that Alanger one, they all way too big to fit on Hornet heads. I therefore had to sculpt the cap. I made it slightly too small for him so that he has to put it on the back of the head.
So then I had bought the Hornet HRH03 head set which were supposed to hold five heads with model 1936 Russian helmets which I think look pretty cool and alien. Big deception when checking the packet two actually wear some Adrian helmets with some red crosses on it. As I had used the cooler looking one on another project, I had to use Tank’s model 1936 helmets set. There are seven of them in the set but they’re far from getting the correct shape which Hornet’s have. Furthermore, I found it to be quite a nightmare to pick out the big resin sprue sticking out of the inside of the helmet WITHOUT destroying the perky borders. I destroyed two before getting one out - finally! So I used one of the Adrian-helmeted Russians of the Hornet set and put that new helmet over the head. The two Mosin rifles, from Tank, were downright superb; the bayonet looked especially cool, so I quickly forgave Tank about my helmet problem.
The equipment is from my spare box, mostly ICM and Dragon parts.

I have observed that on a lot of diorama pictures the figures appear as shiny as if they had been coated in gloss varnish. I find out that the ratio matt/gloss is pretty much vital for the realism of a figure: the clothes have to be really matt, the leather garments as belts and cartridge holders can me somewhat glossier, and so is the skin.

So I began to first paint the clothes with an acrylic basis and then and oils for shadow/highlights, I let them dry for a few days and then sprayed them with some matt varnish. And then I painted the skin, belts etc.

On the reference pictures I used for these two Russian blokes, the helmet appeared indeed as if somebody painted them in a glossy dark green which I did.

more pics here! thanks for getting that far in the article :)