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The projects

(GAMEIN5D in action)

Return to North Africa

15/11/2016

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Now that the madness of getting ready for the show has subsided (and ignoring for a moment the madness of trying to get something on Kickstarter) ... I think I'm done with the extension to the North African piece. The whole thing was supposed to be sparse because (a) it's a desert and (b) I wanted space to be able to add mobile elements and game on it.
Here's one of the trees - trees are hard.
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Why is it that superglue bonds skin  with gleeful enthusiasm but won't glue lichen onto a bit of dry stick? Now most of the superglue has come off my fingers I'm a bit more sanguine about it.
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I've also mostly finished basing the two buildings but I'll post about those later. For now I want to concentrate on the whole board. 
​Here's another of the little bedraggled trees though.
And here's the whole board, combined with the other. I've had to move out of my normal work space to take the photos, and there isn't as much light. The whole board is 1.08m by 0.72m - big enough for our dining table anyway.
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Here's a couple of images from across the board.
That poor little sherman's done some work. I've got more photos of it than my children.
Sorry, I just like taking these - here's the obligatory aerial shot. 
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And finally the whole thing folds up into a nice little set of boxes. Cheers!
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Going
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going
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gone.
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A Time lapse Diorama video

23/10/2016

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For better or worse I have uploaded my first ever video to youtube. Shame about the weird "glitch of blackness" which I'll try and fix. I'm also working on an extension to this board to make an even bigger gaming area. I've done a fair bit so the next few posts will be catching up with where I am with that.
If they video doesn't work for some reason you can always go to my youtube channel, with it's laughably small content of ... 1 video. Although I suspect one or more of my sons creations will appear on there before too long.
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Final post on this one (I promise)

9/10/2016

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I've took, what I hope, are some better photos, and some photos of the whole thing folding away. That's the point of the GAMEIN5D idea, you can build something quite big, with quite a lot of vertical relief (buildings in this case) and it all folds up in a nice, stackable box. I should really put a nice design on the outside of the boxes, maybe for SMW. If you've read this whole diorama post, thanks for your time, and patience.
First some more photos of the details. Not much point in hiding the imperfections, but magnification is not always kind. I hope you notice I even went so far as to hang one of the kids sheets in the background. That's classy that is. And I couldn't face moving all the accumulated junk from my desk.
Finally here's the whole thing disappearing into some nice small boxes. Now I've got space to make even more.
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It's a diorama Jim and something scary

7/10/2016

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I'm calling it done, although I'll almost certainly keep faffing with it. And once the boys get hold of it, I'll be repairing it - a lot.  
Here's a few shots of the detail. I know what's out there and how amazing some the work you all can produce is, but for me, I'm quite pleased with how this turned out.
The thing with the close ups and slide show format though, is that I can't help but think of this as "diorama porn" and imagine some Barry White  in the back-ground.
The "something scary" is that I've got a stall at Scale Model World in Telford in November. I'll be showing off the GAMEIN5D idea, trying to promote my Kick Starter, and using this model (plus some others) as an example of what you can do. Please come and say hi. I suppose I should show it all folding up - that is after all the main point of the GAMEIN5D boards. First one final aerial shot, I think I'm finally getting the hang of them. I'm going to try and take some better final shots for one last post on this.
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A bit of greenery

2/10/2016

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Right from the start, I wanted a very arid look this this but I thought it needed a little vegetation. The bits of privet make pretty good trees, gluing bits of green lichen to them is a nightmare though. Superglue was useless - how can the damn stuff stick fingers do efficiently but won't stick anything else. I ended up using tiny amounts of contact cement and a cocktail stick. 
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I used a small drill to go into the base around rocks or other places I thought a tree could take root. I also put a few tiny fragments of lichen around the bases of the buildings and around the well. I tired to keep everything to the right of objects to give a sense of consistency - almost like a prevailing wind - I guess. 
I also think I'm finally happy with the overall colour. I think I'm ready to call this. It's been fun but it's probably time to ease back on the obsession.
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Where the devil is

1/10/2016

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Details! I've glued that wall down in sections and added rubble next to the lower sections and gaps (rubble + ruin, as before). I tried to have some sense of narrative in that wall sections near craters were broken or at least damaged. The walls had some washes of brush water and agrax earthshade as well as some nuln oil carefully applied to cracks and along the sides.
I'm continuing to paint the small items, boxes, bits of timber etc. On the right here you can just make out the legs of an upturned, broken table, inside the building, it's sitting on a yellow "rug" made from a piece of patterned tissue. It seemed important at the time...
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I wish the photo below had come out better, I was quite pleased with the little signs.
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After reading around a but about Operation Crusader and having a look around North Africa on google maps, I've settled on somewhere south of Tobruk. Hence the signs pointing to Sidi Rezegh and El Adem.
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The well's now finished too, except for a bit of vegetation perhaps. The barrels were painted bolt gun metal before two different rust pigments and a dark wash.

And I'm still working on the colour of the whole board, still got that weird greenish-orange, but it is slowly surrendering to multiple layers of very thin wash. I figure that way I can't do anything too catastrophic.
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Nearly there, just a few more details, keep working on the colour and I'm almost done.
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Walls are hard

30/9/2016

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I think I will start at the end on this post. Below is the complete wall sections that I decided I needed. They are the end result of much failed experimentation and possibly the invention of some new swear words. The walls are not stuck down yet, just put in about the right place. I've no idea how everyone else builds walls but this is how I did it.
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Fairly decisive failure to begin with - too much glue too early. Actually, this is well down the list of failures but pictures of me getting cross with Italeri's wall sections or getting covered in glue probably don't make for great blog posts (I may be wrong, I believe I have established my lack of expertise in these matters).
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But I kept trying, there was something quite compulsive about trying to build a dry stone wall in miniature.
In the end; the method I settled on was the following. I don't for a second suggest anyone else should try this - there must be a better way. Or something on the TV.
First I spread out a plaster mix about 2mm thick across a decent sized piece of kitchen foil. Once it's was dry I bashed it up, while it was tempting to unleash all that middle-aged angst and immolate it, I tried to be careful. I wanted pieces between 5 - 10mm. The foil puts a nice texture on one side which I put on top. Then the "fun" bit. I built small sections of wall on pieces of flat foil, and tried to make the pieces overlap. Like I said, quite fun really, which probably says far too much about me. And it amused my wife, who I suspect, after deciding it wasn't quite the final straw, filed it in the "future grounds for divorce" folder. 
On the last layer of wall I tried to use smaller pieces and lay them side-by -side to it looked like the wall was in two courses.
​Once the wall was built I dripped watered down PVA all over it. Again using a long needle nozzle to make sure every surface was wetted with glue. Once dry the foil peels off the bottom (mostly) and the walls are fairly robust.
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I built various sections, different lengths and heights as I want some parts to be falling down. I also built some wall end sections which I want to put posts into. They got a spray with grey primer first and then I hand painted them with Golem Smeg. But they'll need more painting.
Then I plonked them on the base and took the photo. In between waiting for paint and plaster to dry I've also carried on painting the minor items, you can see some barrels, etc. on the big photo at the top too. And the privet's out of the oven, nicely dried out.
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Minding the gaps and details

26/9/2016

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Much like me, if I stay in place too long, buildings in the desert accumulate a good build up of rubbish around the edges. Also a bit of stuff around the bases of the buildings will allow the hiding of any remaining gaps, or anything else I don't like the look of. I applied a PVA + water solution (40/60ish) along the edges of the buildings with a needle nozzle so it doesn't slosh everywhere.
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Then I sprinkled the remains of the finer bits of of ballast and sand left over from the rubble-isation (I can event words if I want to). It helped to blow gently towards the buildings so that the material built up in the right places. Then just repeat, I tried to use slightly finer particles towards the end. I think it worked better above, but not so good on the left. On the left I used too coarse a material - not for the first time.
Once dry, I wash over several times with the brush water, sometimes taking a bit out and darkening it if I run out of patience with how long it's taking. I've also started thinking about a few minor pieces, road signs, barrels and boxes, minor trash left lying around.
The sand bags are living dangerously. Little pieces of evil that are a nightmare to trim, don't stack and were clearly created with the sole purpose of making life difficult.
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I've seen some awesome sand-bags created by other modelers, but for me they are definitely a work in progress. Also, I think the whole thing needs walls. Maybe walls will be easier than sand-bags.
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I can see the pub from here

25/9/2016

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Well, maybe not the pub, but possibly the end of this project. On a side note, I have actually been to the pub from the XXXX advert, it's in Oz, it's very cool and has (well had 14 years ago) a car from Mad Max 2 parked outside. I spent two weeks out there once (field work, not in the pub) and brought my wife (then fiancee) a stubby (beer bottle) holder, themed shot glass and a fridge magnet back as gifts (from a major silver mining region). And she still married me, bless her.
I took the plunge and glued the buildings down. They've had various washes with Agrax Earthshade over the browns and in some of the cracks and several washes of the water from the brush pot which sounds terrible but gives a really good dusty/dirty look to the surfaces with the same pigments I've used for the base and the buildings. So they look a little better.
I'm still working on the surface colours too but now I've got the buildings down it will force me to be more careful and think about whether I need to keep adding colour. Or I'll be here forever.
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Also, any surfaces I think are too shiny or uniform have had a few wash coats to "knock back" the shine and produce some variation.
So, this "aerial" shot, again produced in partnership with being too short and teaching your children some new swear words because you didn't know they were in ear-shot, shows where I am now 
I'm still not happy with the surface colour in places, too orangey/green and the buildings need to be "blended in" to their surroundings. That means (for me) adding textures to the edges of the buildings so there are no gaps and they look like dust and sand has accumulated around the edges.
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I also need to start thinking about finishing up with accessories, some sparse vegetation, scrubby trees, some discarded equipment and a couple of road signs I think. For the trees I've got some bits of privet drying out in the oven, that's not a phrase I've used before, it'd make a great euphemism for something - "I'm just drying out me privet in the oven".
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Conservation of mass: Ruin + rubble = ?

24/9/2016

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So when a building becomes a ruin, all the blown up stuff doesn't just get vapourised, we're talking explosives not phasers. So for my ruined buildings I've used all the waste pieces, fragments and broken chunks. I even cast a couple of extra building parts in plaster then broke them up. All these extra broken pieces need to make up the missing parts of the ruins.
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Of course, that also means painting all the rubble as well because that's a lot of exposed broken brick work. It's just a tiny bit possible that I assumed that the white plaster on the walls of these houses was pretty damn resilient and mostly survived the shelling and stayed plaster-white.
I also added a load of course balast mixed with fine and medium and some sand. This all went in a tub with the brown paint mix and got a good stir. I left that to dry and then broke it all up and mixed some of the finer white plaster fragments back in.
All this created a reasonably convincing (from a distance, one eye closed) collection of rubble which I laid out across the building bases. Spent far too long "gardening" this stuff but it seemed fairly important to get right. In most of these ruins the roofs come down, that's a lot of rubble. I so want to make a Flintstone's joke now, but I will remain strong.
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The big pieces were glued in with PVA and superglue, depending on how fricking awkward it was, then I followed that up with a misting of PVA + water for the finer stuff, then spent the rest of the evening prising my superglued fingers apart.
I'm still painting too, experimenting with what looks terrible mostly. Nuln oil wash in the craters is way too dark, as you can see above. So now I've got to lighten that up. But I'm still moving forward. 
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Painting the buildings

17/9/2016

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I finally got stuck in and painted the buildings, after all the putting-it-off it went quite quickly, quickly, not necessarily well. I need a lot of practice at this. The problem is, when you try to paint several things at once, you make the same mistakes on all of them.  
Still, living and learning and all that. Here's one of the buildings. It's had a coat of white primer, followed by a coat of Model Air off-white. Then a mix of several brown's and ochres applied to where the plaster has broken off the wall or the interior parts of the wall are otherwise revealed. There's a lot of broken surfaces on a ruined building. I didn't mix the browns really thoroughly, that way I get some variation in tones. 
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I hope you like my Sherman, it's from the Airfix Battlefront kit which is yet another from the started-but-not-going-to-be-finished-anytime-soon pile. I'll be using the Sherman for scale a bit. When I remember
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Some of these buildings are made in clay, others are made in plaster of paris. The fine details are way better in plaster so one a couple I've tried to paint on the rough brick work. It's too small to photo, it looks awesome though - honest, not at all like it was painted by a monkey sat on a washing machine at full spin.
I've also painted the bases inside the houses. A mix of dheneb stone with a bit of brown variation. It's not called dheneb anymore of course, probably "Golem smeg" or something similar. But it's still early days for these, probably going to keep working on them and building up some very thin washes while I wait for other bit's to dry.
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At the same time as I was murdering the buildings with paint, I was also doing a similarly outstanding job of building up the colour of the base. On a whim I'd bought a can of GOLD NC acrylic "sand". I planned to pick out the road and some of the features - to me they look an unpleasant sickly orangey-greenish colour - not very desert like. It took ages to dry as well - must resist World of Tanks.
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What a difference a spray makes.

17/9/2016

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Sprayed everything with matte khaki (Halford's again) I've used this before and don't remember it being so greenish, but me and colour don't always see eye to eye. That said, things look a lot better when everything is a (slightly) more appropriate colour.
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It also occurred to me to take an "aerial" shot, which was a bit hit and miss, because I'm quite short, but eventually (after filling my phone with rubbish pictures and quite a lot of swearing) I got this, which was ok.
I'm not convinced by some of the flat areas, they need breaking up. Also, I need to paint the floors of the buildings a different colour. Other than that I just need to start improving the colour, getting in some variation, shading, etc, oh, and painting the buildings.
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Paint, tweaks and texturing

10/9/2016

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All the elements are glued in place now. I may have procrastinated just a little (a lot) about where everything went but the good thing about gluing everything down is that after a while the decision is made for you and you're stuck with it (Dad joke, I'm so sorry). Sprayed everything over again with grey primer. The Halford's one's have a quite rough matte texture which I like. 
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The unpainted white bits are where I've had to correct for shrinkage of a base by adding a little extra modelling clay.
The photo on the left's a bit ropey (I refuse to spell ropey without an "e" spell-checker) but I've kept it because it shows the imprint of the walls on the bases. 
Surprising; they didn't shrink that badly, I think, because I left the buildings in the bases while they dried, even in the oven. ​I got a bit carried away next, it's not easy to remember to keep stopping to take photos. Before I knew it I'd spread PVA all over bits of the board and was adding ballast (medium and fine) and some kiln dried sand I had left over from constructing a patio, badly.
I've also put the buildings back in temporarily. The job of painting all those pieces is looming like a big, black loomy thing. I did have fun making the road. A couple of intermediate LEGO cogs on an axle, a smear of sand in a vague road like shape, back an forth with the cogs and a road/track appears. 
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 A road complete with something that passes for vehicle (I was going for tank,but let's stick with vehicle) tracks are created, as long as you don't look too closely...

So here's some close ups.
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Next up, I probably need to get some more paint on these, somehow I've come to believe that multiple layers of paint make things better. Maybe they just hide the errors, who knows? I do still have to paint all those buildings though.
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Getting stuck in (well, down anyway)

4/9/2016

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Things will start to take shape now as I am sticking some of the main elements down. I guess this means this is going to be more of a fixed diorama rather than a gaming board - not that my children will mind. I've finished a few other elements. I had a load of plaster - cast rock out crops and boulders so I've included a few elements with them to increase the topography. 

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Also I keep making these jeffin' rocks whenever I have any spare plaster and I never use them. Here's one on the left, more modelling clay, rocks stuck in and another crater for good measure.
I've tried to line up all the rocky elements along a definite trend. All those years as a geologist are finally paying off.
Finally, something that looks like something. This was a first, test layout. I'm just trying to get a feel for how things relate to one another. Looking at photos from the web, buildings tend to all be built in a similar direction, and quite close together, so I'll stick with that idea.
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Let the gluing commence. Before one million different ways of laying this out are explored; I'm going to nail the damn things down or I won't get anywhere. The gluing is easy. Put a tonne of wood glue on the base and smear it out smoothly, slap it on the base board and keep pressing it down until it surrenders and stops curling at the edges. Resistance is futile!
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 Here you can see the dark shadows around all the elements. That's a wide smear of glue as it squeezes out from under the edges.
Also, it appears that resistance is not entirely futile. A few of the elements, like the sand bag emplacements don't seem to fit with the layout and they're too curled up. I'm going to keep these as mobile pieces but they'll need flattening out.
Here they are, glued to a piece of plasticard that's taped very flat to my desk. The glue seems to soften the clay a little and it all gets pull flat, and then dries flat - in theory.
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Busy making bases - and lots of craters

31/8/2016

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So I've made a load of bases for the buildings, arranged some of the broken wall elements into a ruin and based that and built a load of bomb craters. I don't know why but I love making bomb craters. Might have got a bit out of hand. I just flatten a ball of modelling clay into a chubby disk and start squishing the center outwards forming a ridge. Eventually I start pinching the ridge to give it some sharpness and finish by adding a bit of text by pushing some rough surfaces gently over the whole thing.
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I also felt that a well was needed, so I built one of those too. I think it's come out ok. All these elements are made from that Das paper-based modelling clay. It's some mix of papier mache and clay I think. It shrinks and takes too long to dry (unless you nuke it in the oven), but it's pretty cheap and easy to use. Notice one of the many exotic tea towels in use here. Present from the in-laws, they get cruises, we get tea towels, lots of tea towels.
Here's a quick close up of the well. I just formed a circle around the top of a bottle and used a cocktail stick to mark out the bricks by pressing into the clay. The timbers are balsa wood, roughly cut from a larger piece and snapped of at the ends to create a rough looking surface.
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All these bases are dried out now (because I nuked them in the oven) and so they've all curled up a bit at the edges. I'll sort this by using the gentle and sophisticated method of gluing them to death and leaning on them until they capitulate and stay flat.
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    Hello, I'm Jon. 

    I'm very much a learner model maker, especially dioramas, gaming surfaces, models and toy boxes for me and my children.

    I also invented the GAMEIN5D base boarding system which I'm trying to develop into something more.

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