Bounding Fire 2022 Trophy

 After chatting with a friend who wanted to see some of the older work that had not made it to this blog even if they had made it to the ASL blog as in the trophies for the Bounding Fire tournament. This like the others is a 28mm diorama making use of the very wide range of WWII wargaming figures and models out there. As such if anyone wants to commission something and have ideas let me know and we can discuss possibilities.

Every year the winning prize is based on a scenario from the tournament, usually the final round. I tend to playtest the scenarios so have an idea of a scene to depict. This one seemed perfect for the prize.

Unlike the others, this would only have the one figure, this being a German firing a Panzerfaust at the Churchill AVRE tank. Of course this meant the figure had to be a bit special so I was rather happy to find this figure decked out in a camo smock. Thus more details and as I removed the missile from the sculptured flame and added my own replacement flame and smoke, plenty of smoke.

The scenario was set in Bocage country, perfect to add a lot of foliage. I built a bank that bocage typically sat on top of making the dense hedges so much more difficult to cross.

I attached the cut off warhead to a piece of metal rod glued to the panzerfaust tube. This gave a dramatic miss and all the smoke and flame helps disguise the rod.

The Churchill is climbing out of a wheat field, something of a challenge in itself due to the density of the wheat to look right.

As with the larger tank models this was subjected to layers of oil paints to build up grime and paint wear then various pigments were added to give the effect of mud, dirt and dust. 

Of course the part that takes up most of the time to create is the hedge itself, the basic soil finish is my go to sand and texture paint mix with painted high and low lights. This was done over florists oasis foam that I drilled oh so many holes and fitted in lots of foliage from a dozen different pacts to get a very varied finish. 

I would guess at between 70 and 100 separate stalks of foliage ended up in the finished model. Not all of them can be seen as the tank sits on a good few. These still needed adding to allow the tank to bed into them realistically. For the grass I used three different height strands with more yellow based next to the hedge and greener healthier grass as it moved away.

I really enjoyed making this diorama, the amount of detail that can be put into this scale is really nice as the footprint is quite reasonable and as such does not take up too much space. Compared with 1/35 scale dio's which whilst making a real statement can be just too big for some tastes. 

I am toying with buying the old 1/76 scale Matchbox WWII kits that came with mini dio bases. Generally the decals are shot and need replacing but lots of nostalgia and typically easy to post.