Chaos Howdah

I suspect that most modelers, if asked, could give you a list of modelers who inspired them, or in some way changed the way they think about their hobby. I know I can. Like a lot of modelers of my vintage, I was deeply influenced by the Shep Paine diorama inserts that Monogram shipped with their kits in the 1970s. Those were a masterstroke of marketing, if you ask me - I know I bought Monogram kits simply to get my trembling hands on the diorama inserts even if I didn't really give a wet slap for the kit itself. And here is perhaps the most inspiring one of the bunch:

This is, of course, Shep Paine's diorama of a downed US Navy TBD Devastator that shipped with the old-but-impressive 1/48th scale Monogram TBD kit. I found this diorama deeply inspirational, though on the surface, it doesn't appeal to me at all. I find the TBD uninteresting and, well, oogly. Downed airplane dioramas don't appeal to me in general. And since all of my experiments with making water with polyester resin have failed spectacularly, I generally forget that I ever tried.

But there's something about the ethic of this diorama that I found very inspirational. I didn't want to duplicate it, even when I was a wee lad who wasn't yet shaving. But something about Paine's skill and taste spoke powerfully to me. Maybe I didn't want to duplicate this diorama, and maybe I'd never be as good as Paine, but at least he showed me what was possible, and convinced me that there was more to modeling that just hastily gluing parts together and then just as hastily blowing them up again with firecrackers. Viewing this diorama insert seemed to tell me that modeling could be more than just stringy masses of Testors cement, vast gaps between parts, and shooting holes in vintage M48 tank kits with my trusty Remington .22 rifle (my old "Nylon 66" probably destroyed more enemy tanks than Michael Wittmann, and certainly more battleships than Mitsuo Fuchida could have dreamed of).

Another inspiration was actually a single picture submitted to the Reader's Gallery of FineScale Modeler magazine (henceforth referred to as "FSM", because the bicapitalization in "FineScale" just irks the hell out of me). It was a "chaos howdah" built by Fraser Gray. Fraser Gray is perhaps more famous for his AFV modeling, but the chaos howdah he built was just absolutely flabbergasting. It was a fighting platform mounted on two Airfix dinosaurs and manned (if that's the right word) by various 25mm figures that have all the characteristics of Citadel Miniatures. It was a delirium of dark wood, moss, chains and weird artwork. The banner surmounting the whole thing, a graveyard scene with a bloated moon hanging in a blood-red sky and shining through the gaunt black limbs of a tree... Words fail me. It was simultaneously creepy and cool, and it's one of the few models that I've ever deliberately intended to recreate on my own.

I wish I had a picture of it, but the only known photograph of it is in a copy of FSM that probably now occupies some fairly deep layer in an Arizona landfill. The media may be decomposing, but the memory of his fabulous howdah has remained with me over the years. I've always wanted to build my own rendition of it, and can finally report that I've at least started. I finally found a crucial missing element - 1/72nd scale "skeleton warriors" - and with a crew finally assembled and dinosaurs rounded up (Lindberg anklyosaurs), it was time to finally start cutting wood.

My version of the infamous Chaos Howdah, with the major pieces plopped atop one another, with a couple of skeleton warriors for scale. I may rebuild the upper deck, which seems a little beefy and might weigh the dinosaurs down. But then again, it's a chaos howdah and they're chaos dinosaurs; who's to say that they aren't really strong?