Tiananmen Square Diorama Part 1

My friend reminded me of how much I love this image, and being at a loose end this weekend I decided to try to build a diorama of it. This is a picture of "Tank Man", an unknown man who famously blocked tanks as they entered Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989. In the famous footage, "Tank Man" stands in front of the oncoming tanks, stopping them in their tracks for several minutes before being pulled away by passers-by. His identity remains unknown, and many believe he is still alive. It's a powerful image.

I ordered this Trumpeter 1/72 scale Type 59 tank kit from the internet. I'm very impressed with the detail on the kit, and the parts were very well moulded, with minimal mould lines or flash.

The kit went together quite easily, but I needed to make a few additions to make the tank accurate to the photo. I added an aerial made from a guitar string ( a low E), and I removed the "wrapping" from it. In the photo, the gun atop the turret has a cloth covering it, and I made this using Milliput. I also sculpted the tank's spare tracks from Milliput. The main gun on the tank has some sort of "cover", so I took a small drinking straw and covered one end with putty. I painted the model with very thin acrylics over a white primer.

The base was quite simple. I used an MDF cake base (I think it was 8" square) and tore off the silver paper. I then covered it in pre-mixed filler. My idea was that the grains of powder in the filler would stimulate the road texture. I think it worked quite well! I then painted the base black and used a sponge to create a broken grey effect. I used masking tape to lay out the road markings. 

It didn't take much time or effort, but I'm happy with how the base turned out.

Once I was finished painting the camouflage on the tank, I gave it a coat of gloss varnish and applied the decals. Unfortunately the tank's "number" isn't visible in the original photo, so I just used the "308" decal that came with the kit. Once the decals were on, I gave them a few more coats of gloss varnish to seal and protect them.

Next, I moved on to weathering. For this, I decided to give oil paints a try. 

I mixed some black and brown oil paint together, and thinned them quite heavily. I wanted to make an "oily" appearance for streaks of grime down the sides of the tank. I painted the mixture onto the model roughly at first.

Doesn't look great right now. The next step was to soften and shape the streaks of oil using cotton buds once the paint had had some time to dry.

Now that looks better! I'm going to leave the model for at least a few days before I matt varnish it, because oil paint can take a long time to dry, even when thinned. 

The project is well on its way to completion, but there are still a few more problems, most notably representing Tank Man himself. I don't think a miniature of him is available in 1/72 scale. My plan is to take a generic figure of a man in a neutral pose and convert it to be Tank Man. 

Thank you for reading my first blog post! Hopefully there will be many more!