I am planning a diorama commemorating the Stigler/Brown incident in 1/72 scale- The wounded B-17 will be limping along, and Franz will be seen giving a salute as he peels away.
All this took place over the North Sea, and even though I will have to fudge the scale a bit, I want to make the base intereesting- I want to show the sea itself.
I have never done a water base, and especially not one where I need to sculpt it to make it look rough (A Higher Call describes whitecaps), and paint it to look cold and gray.
If someone could help me with some techniques and materials that would help be do this, that would be fantastic.
If the B-17 is at any great altitude, the sea below, due to perspective, would not need to be scuptured. The actual 3D appearance of the sea is not visible at distances of a few hundred feet or more. All you need is a flat “painting,” representing the sea, with water color and a small marks in white as white caps.
One easy way to avoid painting is to go to Google Earth, and download an area of sea where the image has whitecaps. Zoom out to an altitude appropriate for your diorama, download the image, print it, glue it to your base, and clearcoat it. You can even do the whole ground area for your diorama by selecting, in Google Earth, the area where this happens.
That could work- the B-17 isn’t high, (I think it was 2 or 3 thousand feet at this point), but in A Higher Call, it mentions that even from that altitude, the crew could see swells.
If nothing else ends up working, I’ll probably use your google earth idea.
But from several thousand feet you see the swells by the color variations, not stereoscopic vision. So a properly colored flat surface works. The beauty of an aerial or satellite photograph is that the coloring and shading are already done for you.
