International Scale Modeller

I've been working on this for a few months now, I had it built and painted in Dunkelgelb back in July, but it sat in it's box until I got an inspiration for a diorama:



I wanted to make a ruined city base that has some depth, so I used Tamiya's plastic brick walls to lift the edges up a bit. Following that, I used air-drying clay to fill in the groundwork, adding some plastic bits to it. Most notably an old Tamiya barrel. Then, following Hamilkar Barkas's Youtube videos, I cast my own concrete brick and smashed it to pieces to create realistic rubble. I then used a lot of pigments to colour it.





Here's some pictures of the camouflaged Maus. I originally wanted to go for the "octopus" scheme, but that should have been painted with hard edges, so I might just leave it as is. I didn't want to paint the actual real Maus from Kummersdorf, so this is a bit of a "what-if" build.

Edit: D'oh, obviously this isn't a Meng product, blame me for writing the post without checking the box.

Here are the decals, and aside from one problem, they're absolutely beautiful. You wouldn't have to apply any decal adhesive on these, the carrier film is just invisible!







And if we zoom to the swastika on the front, we see the one problem.



As you can see, there are raised bits there because the swastika is made of two different decals laid on top of each other. You wouldn't notice it looking at it from any length, but up close it's very, very, very noticeable and it bothers the hell out of me. Good news is that this is of course a "not real" marking option so it wouldn't bother anyone building the one real Maus. Next up I suppose I should do pin washes and an oil filter.

nice job so far!

some questions.

so why a sauwastika (inverted) instead of the normal third reich angled swastika?

you say the decals are very good, what brand are they TAKOM?

Vindicare wrote: ↑Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:00 pm some questions.
so why a swastika (inverted) instead of the normal third Reich angled swastika?

Yes, I'm afraid that the way you have it orientated is an Indian religious symbol!

I thought something was weird about that swastika, I didn't realize it was inverted until I showed these photos to a friend and he asked the same thing. I only then noticed the Takom instructions tell you to put it on the wrong way around, but looking at photos that was a mistake mostly made by Allied soldiers. Maybe it's something to do with manufacturers being shy about using the Swastika? I decided to scrub it off the tank and just paint over it.



Also since there were no official standards for putting swastikas on tanks, the crews pretty much had free reign over painting those on, I've seen captured panzers with a Swastika painted on straight instead of angled, but never inverted.

And to the second question, yes, they were Takom decals. absolutely 10/10 for those.

well im an airplane guy myself thats why i noticed the swastika thing.

so now, wash time?

I will be proceeding with a dot filter and some acrylic washes tomorrow, hoping to get this mounted on the diorama by Friday.

Here's a few photos before I head off to visit home for the weekend, I don't think I'm gonna be able to finish this one off before next week. I keep having trouble with using pigments, I tend to put on too much and after using matt varnish on them the pigments just turn into clumps.

I'm calling this one done for now, I still should add some figures at a later date, but I'm not feeling up to painting those right now.

cool