Figures

Mujahadeen Freedom Fighter

  This is a Mujahadeen freedom fighter in Afganastan.  He is armed with a captured Russian RPG-7 anti-tank rocket, which he is reloading.  This figure was thrown together one morning as an experiment.  The diorama was made the next day with a few small rocks (big by his standards), and some find pebbles and dust that I collected from my driveway.

 

US Navy SEALs in Viet Nam


Fig. 1		   Fig. 1 shows my first attempt at making jungle foliage.  The leaves are all made from paper with a thin piece of wire glued down the center to 1) act as a spine, 2) maintain the fold of the leaf, and 3) have an end that is stuck through a small hole in the base of the diorama.

  The tree was mad by tightly twisting wires together similar to a cable.  Once this bundle was long enough, the wire was repeatedly dipped in Elmer's glue to give the tree truck a more uniform body.  These were all my own ideas, and they all worked very well.

 

  Fig.2 shows a close up of the sailors and the foliage.  The leaves are all paper with HEAVY coats of paint, applied perpendicularly to the spine of each leave.  This gave a very believable appearance that the leaves all have veins.
Fig. 2

 


Fig. 3		   Fig 3.  The standing man is armed with a WW II M3 "Grease Gun" and a LAWS rocket.  The kneeling man is armed with the Stoner, a weapon used exclusively by the SEALS during the Viet Nam war.  The Stoner was a belt fed machinegun that could be configured in many different ways.  The SEALs loved it, but for some unknown reason, it was no kept after the war.