Ok, so after letting the whole thing sit for a few days, it was quite apparent that the clay was literally shrinking before our eyes as it dried. I knew that clay shrinks upon drying... but not this much. It really really shrunk.

I definetely should have waited until the clay was fully dry before adding it to the wall. My original thinking was to have it semi-dry such that I could mold the bricks together to get a more realistic appeal.

The end result of the shrinking was that the blocks looked really bad with huge spaces between them.

Anywho, my son was like "what are we gonna do cause this sucks monkey-butt!"... and I was like "dude - take it easy... we can fix this"... So I basically pulled off most of the bricks (as you can see in the first pic) and re-applied them closer together with a hot-glue gun action. Our diorama is now 1/8th of an inch shorter ;-)

I'm happy to report that everyone is again happy in my household. What a save!


Below you will see the first pics of us applying the paint. This is the first coat... we will do a few more coats of dark grey... then add some color to it to make it look all Laura Croft Tomb Raiderish.... whoo hoo!

Here's the pics!



I'm sorry folks, but I'm looking at this pic and thinkin' "Damn this is sick!" Woot!



And we got a little order from smalljoes.com today ~ four Cobra troopers. We position them on the diorama to take some test shots...




So there you have it... that's where we're at. We'll be workin on the paint for the next day or so... then I have to take a business trip for a few days before we make any more major progress.

Thoughts? Comments?

Cheers! ~ Paul.