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This figure came about from modeling campaign being hosted on Armorama.com. This campaign was called Camou Craze. It covered camouflage military uniforms of the modern era 1989 to present. My figure represents an Infantryman from the 7 US Infantry Division Light during Operation Just Cause, December 20, 1989 through January 1990. This was the invasion of Panama to overthrow Dictator Noriega and to install the people elected new government.
The construction of the figure was out of the box. The only addition was to use desolved plastic to fill in the gaps between the torrso and arms and at the waist line. I made the smoke grenade from small electronic resistor. The sling for the M16A2 is a strip of aluminum foil.
I used Testor's Model Master Acrylic paints for the skin and the enamels for the rest of the figure.
The uniform
BDU, (Hot Weather Battle Dress Uniform) was painted in four stages,
one for each color. The colors I used were Military Brown (FS 30117),
Forest Green (FS 34127), US Army/Marine Gulf Sand (2136), and Flat Black
(FS 37038). I started with the forest green and applied the base color.
Next I created a darker shade and appliedit to the shadows. Followed by a
lighter shade of the base color and applied it to the highlight areas.
This was repeated for each of the four colors.
The flak jacket along with all the LCE items were similarly painted
using Olive Drab (FS34087) I also attached a small strip of paper (painted
in gun metal, dry brus with steel) on top of the left sleeve to depict the
Glit tape worn
Helment
The 7 Infantry Division units used strips made from BDUs to create
their distictive cover. In order to recreate this I painted a small peice
of paper in a BDU camouflage pattern. Next I cut small strips and
superglued each strip onto the Kevlar Helment. While it was a very tedious
method, the end result made it worth the effort.
Was very simple and straight forward, it consisted no more then dry brushing the figure once it was completed. Since most of the ground in Panama was a reddish brown, I used Testor's Military Brown.
Dragon's 1:35 World's Elite Forces series, U.S. Light Infantry, (kit # 3009)
