Mustang, 1944

 I think I finished this plane in the Summer of 2021, but forgot to post it. Old Revell kit, molds from 1959:

West Berlin, 1980s

Tamiya's now-old 1/35 scale British Chieftain with the Berlin Brigade urban camo scheme. I bought this kit in the late 70s. I had it about 80% done with the boxtop's yellow-green paintjob, got bored with the look, and put it back in the closet.

In the Fall and Winter of 1981, I was in Berlin off and on, such an odd place back then: the Wall, black-clad war widows, punks, Turks, dirty snow, tanks sitting on streetcorners. The West, bright and lively; the East, gray and suppressed.

So this diorama is a memory of bits of Berlin, with the added plus of a quirky local camouflage that didn't yet exist when I was there, although it came out shortly after.

The tank is all handpainted, mostly with craftstore acrylics; and weathered a bit with a pencil and dry pastels. I have not applied any decals, I like the plain look. Likewise, no snow. The Wall is scrapwood, topped with a piece of water pipe. Most of the graphics and text are taken from online photos, plus a few quotations that are relevant to my time there. I don't remember any large-scale graffiti art, and show none.

Snow is baking soda. Smut is local charcoal, ground fine with a file. Sand and slush is a combination of diluted paint and table salt. All were sprayed with a fine water-mist to make them settle down.

The base is a piece of whiteboard, gray side up, which shows through bare spots in the ice and snow.

Panther

France, Autumn 1944. I don't care for Allied tanks in WW2, but I do like the US Army uniform palette. And I like the German armor 3-color camo scheme. So this is a cherry-picking 1/35 diorama of stuff I'm interested in. Tamiya and DML Dragon US soldiers, and Italeri's 1993 Panther. The kit comes with optional Zimmerit panels, but I enjoy doing my own. I like the Panther's clean lines, and left off brackets, tow cables, tools, etc. that to me just add visual clutter. Likewise no markings or much weathering leaves the camo scheme intact. As usual I used craftstore acrylic paint, and for the first time in about 50 years, handbrushed everything. The picture framers made the frame too big (miscommunication on my part), so I cut a mat out of a pizza box to make up the difference.

Memory

Long ago I used to sail at the drop of a hat. I had a friend, Bob, a retired engineer who lived in a house on the lake. Probably 40 years my senior, but sailing can erase such differences. He had a bigger boat, a Venture 24 I think, much easier to sail than the little 420 I hiked out on. So when we were both out alone on frigid winter days, I'd leave my boat at his dock and we'd schmooze on his Venture.

I had (still have) another friend, Marco, an Italian grad student from a peach-growing family near Bologna. Soon enough he was sailing too, and the 3 of us would coalesce on Bob's Venture. Marco was doing a thesis on how the quantity of light that fell on individual branches of a given peachtree affected the peaches. He was making these little thumb-joint-sized boxes from scratch with photo-sensitive cells that generated a tiny, but measureable, amount of electricity. And the guinea-pig trees had these boxes fastened to their branches, and the electrical data went into something with a memory, and it was all more than I related to as a young architect. One afternoon I was driving Bob's Venture while he and Marco discussed the photo-boxlets, and how they could be finessed to provide the same quality information from each one, and all that sorta stuff. We glissando'd on the water for an hour like that. I was happy to manage the boat, saying nothing, while they thought big and little about the thesis. Setting aside epiphanies about my family, this was arguably the most-human moment I can remember from my life thus far.

The mundane can be crazy heavenly.