Today’s brief update is showing my progress on the diorama base. As you can see I’m going for a dirt street and section of sidewalk. The base is made from a piece of timer chopped to size and then edged with a styrene skirt. On top of this does a dirt mix and then the cement. I added too much black to the hydrostone “cement” mix so it’s a little bit dark, but that’s ok it will paint up to the right colour just fine.
Ignore the strange effect on the dirt – I had just applied some more (a dirt and PVA mixture) on top of the base dirt coat (which is dirt, hydrostone and a glob of PVA).
Here’s the Fiddler sitting on top to show the scale. The next step is to scallop out slightly the spots where the feet will go, fill them with a sand and gel medium mix and then press the Fiddler into it to make it look “settled” into the ground (rather than hovering slightly above it). This thing would weigh a few tonnes so it would certainly put some pressure on the ground!
Once that’s all done I’ll paint the edging in gloss black, mask it off and then paint the dirt and cement.