" On Guard " dio feat HGUC Zaku

Hello guys, while working with the initial mods of the Acguy...which is the removal of the armor parts, I got bored doing the same thing over and over again ( the drilling is boring ). Plus, I have primed the Acguy base with flat black already...now the problem is, I am lazy to set-up my airbrush just to paint the Acguy base, so an idea came to mind.

Tadah! I present to you " On Guard "...a simple diorama featuring a HGUC Zaku on top of a cliff and under him is a damaged Guncannon. The Guncannon was my second HGUC build, painted with airbrush and finished around February of 2009...Not much story involve here, it's just that the Zaku is doing his rounds guarding the perimeter of a nearby Zeon base. I am still thinking if I will do a snow type dio or a tropical type with trees and such...The problem with tress, is that the one's yout get from artshops are really student project looking for me...so I might opt to do a snow dio eventually, unless I find evergreen trees in a local hobbyshop, which I highly doubt I could.

Anyways here are pics of the intended initial layout of the dio...it is basically styropor glued together and reinforced with barbecue sticks...


PICTURES of the finished model:    " On Guard "

UPDATE 11-20-09: Texturing the dio

Hello again guys, I will be working with a PG Zeta commision work soon so I might have to set aside the acguy build, but I will try to finish this build first. I managed to work on the dio texturing yesterday....It took me roughly 4 hours to do the paper mache. I never imagined that it will take me that long though. I had fun developing the ridges and curves of the dio and I am very much eager to paint this piece already. Anyways this is how I went through the texturing...

Materials used:

A roll of tissue paper

A bottle of white glue ( preferably wood glue )

Water

A large soft brush

White glue dilluted in water with a 50:50 ratio

This is initially how the dio looked like...basically just styropor, glued and skewed together with barbecue sticks...

After layers and layers of the paper " tissue " mache, I managed to tone down the edges and made it looked like a cliff somehow...

Now, I let this stand overnight and then applied my Glue + Sand mixture to the piece. Notice that I applied the sand mixture on the corners only, wherein rubble and boulders would fall from the sides of the cliff. I also strategically dubbed some on the level surfaces to give the ground a different texture in contrast to the texture of the sides of the cliff. Also, notice that the Tissue mache has a nice boulder/rock texture onced dried...this is why I chose to use Tissue rather than newspapers as mache...newspaper mache is good for large projects of course, but for small dios like this...it does not give the same rough but small texture as the tissue mache. Here are the pics...

Nice...now I will just have to wait until this is fully dried under the sun, then it will be ready for painting...Up Next I will show you how I paint my groundwork to try to make it look as detailed and as realistic as possible...I tend to see a few works painted with a base color then drybrushed with a lighter tone...even with washes...it will look monotone if you make the painting simple and it will tend to look like a rushed school project. ;b

On Guard WIP part II - painting the dio