Subject: Diorama
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 20:14:38 +0200
From: René Hieronymus <aon.912187449@aon.at>
Organization: Hieronymus
To: "Timothy Dike" <Cadman@modelwarships.com>

Hello Timothy,

now here is my story behind this dirorama: It all started when one of my
cats accidentally damaged one of my older dioramas, it crashed down from a
shelf and waspretty heavily damaged. (Don´t worry that cat is still alive!)
When I decided to rebuild this diorama I had to build one airplane
completely new, cause one of the original one was truly destroyed. I
decidied to build a PBJ-1D (Air Force B-25D). But for this I needed a lot of
photos showing interior details of this püarticular plane and so I started
searching for this. Thats when I stumpled across one particular photo
showing a B-25 at very-very low level attacking a Japanese Warship. At the
same instant I knew that this will be my next diorama. A few month later I
started the work in earnest. The airplane was no problem at all, I took the
1:72 scale model of a B-25H Gunship from Italeri but the ship was not that
easy at all! My first idea was to take the old Matchbox, now Revell Kit of
the Flower Class in the same scale and convert it into a Japanese! At least
it sounded good to me, but as soon as I had the kit and started looking at
it, I realized that this would be either a very major rework or simply
impossible! Most of all I was afraid that when I would finish the diroama
that someone would say to me, nice work and good idea, but there has
never-ever been such a Japanese Warship! The next thing that happened is
that a friend of mine came up with a book containing some large scale plans
of different Japanese Warships and to my greatest surprise among them was
EXACTLY the plan of this ship shown on the photograph! That´s when I decided
to build the whole ship by myself. From the photos you willsee that I used a
wooden skelton for the hull which was covered with cardboard. The bridge and
the deckhouse were all built from plasticsheet and self made parts.
Specially the guns and the AAA turned out to be a real headache, first of
all I had to get good plans of them and then I had to build them entirely
scratch. But I think the result speaks for itself. All the tiny details were
added a nd a lot of time was spent in coloring and weathering. The diorama
itself is 1,2 x 1,6m on a wooden base. The watersurface was done in my most
favorite way by using Toilettpaper and wall paper glue. This pretty simple
method turns out very realistic when properly painted! The little geysers
are made of cotton which was first of all sprayed with Future and later
softly colored. At the end they were simply glued to the surface of my
"water". Alltogether I worked almost exactly 1 year (900hrs) on this model.
At the end I can say that this model opened up a new possibility for my
hobby, cause few weeks later I started to build the model I´m dreaming of
since more than 20 years, a US Navy Carrier in 1:72, actually this is going
to be the CVE-26 USS Sangamon. Hopefully I will be able to send you some
photos of this model too, but it´´s still at work (since 1 1/2 years) and I
estimate another 2-3 years for me to finish this monster!

Hope you liked my short story about his diorama and
 keep on modeling!

René Hieronymus

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