I'm going to leave the buildings for a while (they are almost finished, apart from a few details like fitting the windows and shutters, which I will return to later) and move on to the groundwork.
The ravine and bridge
Landscaping is, for me, one of the most relaxing parts of the build. This is because there are far fewer 'rules' in nature than there are in architecture. OK, so it's important to make everything look geographically 'appropriate', but even here there are usually exceptions. For example, you might associate a palm tree with the desert and other hot climates - but I have seen them growing happily in the Western coast of Scotland. And, of course, wherever man imposes himself on the landscape in the form of roads and bridges, there are certain things that look right - and certain things that don't.
Above all, I was looking to impart a sense of drama to my diorama - beyond the buildings, vehicles and figures - and the groundwork was simply another way to achieve this. The most obvious way was to make a ravine which cuts across the landscape and a bridge to carry to road into the town. This not only provides visual interest - the drop in height and the chance to add rocks and foliage within - but also helps to break up the scene into different segments of interest. So the area to the left of the bridge, which is actually quite a small part of the total area, becomes the 'outskirts' of the town, the bridge the way into it and the larger area to the right the town itself.
By now I had also settled on the following vehicles: a Fiat Topolino (in German service) crashed into the field on the left, a Universal Carrier stopped on the bridge and a knocked-out Stug in front of the church.
I should say at once that all of this was new to me - I have never modelled either a bridge or a ravine before.
As far as the bridge itself is is concerned, I had a look on-line and it's fair to say that there is quite a good selection available in 1/35. However, most were either too big, too formal - or too flimsy (e.g. made of wood). In my part of Italy bridges are generally built solidly of stone and usually arched. Above all, I wanted my bridge to
fit the scene. This meant that it certainly had to look big enough to take the Carrier (not so much of a problem) but also, potentially, the Stug, which had been moving towards it when it shed a track. And yet it also had to be quite small...
The sides for the bridge were made in much the same way as my church. Each side was cut to shape from two layers of foam board (in the end I made the parapet only one layer thick) and then covered with Das before some relief was carved in. The walls were kept removable from the base so that I could work on them more easily.
The smaller one is on the 'upstream' side (i.e. the one facing the back of the diorama) so it is smaller to take account of the narrower ravine at that point.
As discussed at the beginning of this blog, the advantage of the insulation board was that I was able to roughly cut away the ravine very quickly and even leave in place the basic shape of the bridge. This also meant that, as I developed the bridge sides, I could simply carve away the landscape to allow them to slot into place.
Eventually, when I had reached the stage of adding the ground texture to the diorama (which I will cover later), I created the effect of the stone surface of the bridge 'floor' showing through in places. This was achieved by pushing square cobbles (from
M.A.N. Models) into the Das surface and adding a thin slurry of diluted plaster so that only a few could be seen.
As my ideas evolved I decided to place a small building on the left side of the bridge. The little square building is a delightful plaster casting from the French firm
Mark 35. It's supposed to be a covered well. The original casting had stone texture all round, but I partially covered it with Das clay to make it look like a typically Italian building with chipped render.
I then had the idea that it might serve as a guard house and remembered that I had an old
Italeri Checkpoint kit with a lifting barrier. As you will see, I ultimately decided to replace the barrier with a superior one from
Plus Models and took the idea one stage further by having the barrier broken in two as if to represent the moment of 'liberation' (my title and theme).
In my next posting I will deal with the ravine itself...