The idea to this Diorama came up when I finished Fujimi´s Sea Knight (CH-46E) I wanted to display the model on a little base, but I wanted to do something different. So when looking in some books I came up with the idea of showing a so called “VerTrep” short for “Vertical Replenishment” So after finishing the Helicopter which was build almost completely out of the box, with only a few scratch build parts to detail the landing gear and some parts for the cockpit and off course 3 crew figures the only thing which was left was this part of a ship.

This ship-part does not show a specific ship. It was entirely scratch build , mostly out of plastic-sheet and some wooden parts. Additional small details made the whole thing looking a little bit more realistic, like antennae’s, safety nets and so on.

The water surface was build in my favourite way, which is a very simple technique. I use simple toilet paper and wall paper glue. So when the ship section was finished I made a small wooden base and put the ship on it. After that I simply soaked the base with glue and added layer after layer of the paper on it. By using for fingers (pretty messy) or a medium sized brush I formed the waves and other irregularities on the water surface. It takes quite some hours to dry but normally after a day or two you can colour the whole surface, for which I use acrylics mostly.

The whole Diorama was finished within about 60 hrs. including the Helicopter and the ship, so it was a pretty fast work.

Photos and text © 2005 by Rene Hieronymus

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

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