"Giving the way and link" blaue division

[Guest]

Well, hello everyone. Some of the readers will recognize this title from another forum one year ago. After a year, I decided to retake the project that I left abandoned a few months ago.

To put the diorama in context, I ll base this diorama on the krasny bor battle, which was an offensive made by the soviets to break the leningrad siege. Hopefully (for the germans), the trenches were defended by 3 companies of the comonly known as "blue division", which was formed by spanish veterans of the spanish civil war. The soviets thrown 44.000 soldiers supported by 100 t-34 and kv-1 tanks, 800 187mm artillery cannons amd aviation support against 5900 spanish soldiers that were previously hammered during 2 hours by all the red army arty with bombs falling with no more than 10 secs of difference in a front of less than 5km. The russians, thinking that nobody could have survived advanced without taking proper precautions, something that was a great mistake as they will see later. The line holded but not without heavy losses on the spanish side: more of the half part of the defenders were declared KIA or MIA (3400), and more than 1000 soldiers were injured, leaving the whole division reduced to a single operative company. However, the russian losses (all the tanks and nearly 10.000 deads) allowed the germans to push back again the russians, leaving the nothern red army without response capability.

This diorama will try to recreate the madness of this battle in a very small base. It will show the combat inside a trench that I already started to sculpt and that I will show on the next post (I don t know why I can post an image while opening a thread).

Right now I have prepared 4 figures: a radio-operator that will be shouting into the radio and that will be directing the mortar support fire with the help of an observator. The 2 remaining will be a machinegunner and a rifleman.

The title of the diorama is a part of the engineers athem that refers to the signal corp: the do the link between the different troops.

I hope you will enjoy this dioramawith me. Awfully, I lost a big part of the process photos and development on another forum that shut down a few months ago.

[Guest]

As promised, I'll start to upload the photos of my advances.

Firstly, I’d like to begin with the base in which the models will be placed: the main structure is made of aquaplast. As I said before, I lost the photos of the process, but it is very simple: I place a frame made out of cardboard in top of a wooden base, leaving a small place in the centre, that formed the trench itself. Also, I decided to add a destroyed part of the trench, probably hit by a shell or something similar:

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In the case of the walls, I basically took some toothpicks, cut the tops and used a cutter to give them an irregular shape. The plan is to get a thick wire and put them in between the different sticks to simulate this kind of wall:
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Once done, I'll add a Vallejo diorama effect called "Thick Mud" with a black colour to all the diorama, and in top of it a snow effect called kricell fine snow. In the end, the basic distribution of the diorama should be something like this:
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P.S. The white powder that you see is a test that I made with the snow and also part of the aquaplast. I realized to late that instead of doing the base and then painting it with airbrush, I should have mixed the colour with the aquaplast, but now is too late. I'll figure out how to solve this problem later, especially on the sides of the diorama, that should be completely black.

[Guest]

i'll use this post to show 2 of the figures that I already finished:
the first one is the observer, that is using an ushanka with the simbol of "la falange" (one of the fascist parties that won the civil war) and a captured russian coat with the spanish flag on the arm:
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as you can see, on the left hand there is some green stuff that I have to paint due to a change of binoculars that I made after I painted the figure. Changing the binos I broke the hand so I had to rebuild it.

The second figure is the radiooperator that will be using the german radio "tornFu B1", a photoetched that I bought to northstarmodels. In this case I had to build with green stuff the arm that is using to cover his ear and the phone that is plugged to the radio. The only thing left is to paint the gloves with a light grey:
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In addition to that I'm building 2 more figures right now which are a machinegunner (that will be using a snow overcoat) and a rifleman, both with a littlebit of green stuff work

Lastly I profited to continue the base and I started the walls of the trench. Here I used wooden sticks that I smashed to get planks with the pliers (the texture of the pliers gave a very good texture to the planks) and small toothpicks for the vertical poles:
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I also took care of doing one of the walls damaged due to the explosion that hit the trench:
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Once everything was in placed it looked like this:

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As you can see I also started to do some tries with the Mud that I will use in thetrench floors. I only have to finish some of the last walls at the end of the trench and then I ll start with the mud texture.

I hope you enjoyed the process and I'll be waiting for your critics and ideas. Also I would like to apologize for the images quality but as you can see I'm not a very good photographer :smiling6:. Also, tell me if you think that I put too much photos or maybe the post are too redundant.

[Guest]

Nice progress sofar looking forward for further development! Good luck with the rest regards Danny

[Guest]

Well, small update guys, I finished al the walls and added the mud that will go under the snow. Y painted it in a dark brown and after that gave it a dry brush with a lighter brown. Lastly I added a very diluted dark brown to the footsteps that I put on the trench. Profiting the texture of the mud I started to form the crater of the explosion and the collapse of the terrain that goes in the trench.

I also started adding some winter bushes to the exteriors. The only thing remaining in terms of the mud is maybe to add some different coulours to the earth that entered the trench to simulate the different stratum. I would have continued, but it is 3 a.m. and I think it is time to take some rest. BTW, sorry for the foto quality but I wanted to upload the photos before going sleep and the lighting is terrible. Also, the snow that you see on one of the sides of the trench was just a test to see if the glue that I ll use was good enough.


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I ll be waiting your critics and ideas!

[Steve Jones]

I have had a good read through Miguel and it was wonderful to see how you work. Looking forward to seeing the figures in place. Keep it comin sir:thumb2:

[Guest]

Well, I finished the base with the walls and the snow. Sorry again for the light, but it is again night. As always I ll wait your advices if you have some.

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