I am fairly new to Armorama. I became active in the forums when production on my Omaha Beach diorama really got going. Boy, is it complicated - but the community here has been exceptionally helpful on a daily basis, either directly to me or indirectly in other people's forum topics or links to other modelers' completed projects. And the work here is nothing short of inspirational! It is so nice to see how others tackle some of the same issues that I'm dealing with. I do apologize in advance, though: I do from time to time say some pretty dumb things in these forums, but I usually have second thoughts later and go back to edit them.
So if you see that I've made an idiot of myself and it's already been a few days since the post, well, there's always that possibility too!I'm an active member of the National Capital Model Soldier Society (NCMSS), a DC-area figure painter club, and I also spend two or three weeks each summer as an instructor in the Smithsonian Institute's summer camp program for kids, co-teaching a class called "Soldiers & Dioramas" for kids. We use historical battles as a backdrop to teach hobby skills in terrain building and figure painting. (We also try to sneak some history lessons in when they're not looking!)
Here's a shot of the recent (2002) NCMSS group project to benefit Antietam National Battlefield. All proceeds from the sale of this diorama were donated to the National Park Service. The project was nearly finished at this stage, but we had not yet finished picking up a lot of the grass that remained after trimming the "lawn" to the desired height. The Club picked yours truly to coordinate this project, and I did a fair amount of work on the terrain, grass, fences, story design, and layout myself. I only did one of the figures, because no one else wanted to do the Colonel Gordon conversion!
(Note to other modelers desperate enough to emulate this grass technique: You can probably count the number of bags of Woodland Scenics Field Grass used to make this, by counting the different colors. To a certain degree, we had intended to mix yellowish grass in among two shades of green to avoid the astro-turf appearance, but had not counted on this stuff's tendency to a) vary so much between bags of the "same" color, b) fade at dfferent rates over time, and c) get used up so quickly, requiring several purchases over time. Otherwise we would have bought enough in the beginning and mixed it all together in one gigantic mountain to avoid the bands of color you see in the photo. In fairness, though, the bands are not so evident when viewed from a more oblique angle.)
Other views, and a few of my D-Day project, may be seen here:
http://photos.kitmaker.net/showgallery.php/cat/500/ppuser/7314
