BEVERAGE COOLER DISPLAY

(BEST VIEWED IN LARGE SIZED, BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS - PLEASE NOTE THE EVEN MORE HUMUNGOUS ORIGINAL SIZE IS IMPOSSIBLY EPIC SO BEWARRREEEE.....ONLY TO BE SCREENED IN TECHNICOLOUR MAXIMUSMAXULTRAHYPERCINEMASCOPE...)

HOLIDAY GREETINGS TO ALL MY FLICKR MATES.

What If...? Iron Man was born in Bethlehem and
Tony Starkmas was celebrated each year...?

MY LITTLE NATIVITONY

Away in a manger,
Sleeps baby Shellhead
The billionaire Tony
Laid down his steel head

Our Stark is a bright guy
Inventing's his way
The billionaire Tony
Iron Man of the day!

The eyeslits are glowing
Our hero they wake
The billionaire Tony
So handsome a rake

"We love Thee, wee Tony"
The babes all do sigh
And stay by his side,
'Til morning is nigh.

Now cheer on our Tony,
A playboy at play
To our Golden Avenger
Even Thor says Thee, "Yay!"

So don all your armour
It's the coolest of wear
To light this diorama
Repulsors must flare!

Sometime (not nearly enough!) before Christmas I thought it might be a beaut idea to have a go at creating an Iron Man themed Nativity.....

Sadly, no one tried to stop me, and my medication ran out while dear Doctor Hackenbush was away on holiday.

Then again, as a cheerful atheist and ubergeek if I want to celebrate the holiday season this is a relatively logical way for me to do it.

The Iron Manger concept grew from an idle thought I had about the technology obsessed humanist/futurist Iron Man/Tony Stark being a more personally appropriate fictional character for me to spotlight at this time of year.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time!" is the rallying cry for hobbyists forever and a day.

Which is precisely how long it took to craft and shoot this ludicrously intricate beast of a project.

First, the stables. I cut the walls and roof from MDF craftwood and then went in with a Dremel tool and hand carved the stone facades. The stables are painted with acrylics and the roof is thatched with dried Australian native grass.

There's certainly more windows than you'd generally need for a stable, but then I wanted to stick figures through them, so, "Go Figure!"

I resorted to my tub of good old, lumpy English yellowstone plaster for the base, which was a problem as I spilt a bit of water on at one stage during construction...oh well, no art without mess!

Dressing the set was the next 'bear', but I had a lot of fun once I figured out this this was, after all, an Iron Manger, so logically it would also be an armourer's workshop. The forge is carved from blue insulation foam but the jeweller's anvil is from my own workshop. The Manger is a painted plastic crate from the Marvel Figure Factory range. (No prizes for guessing what kind of figure came in it!) The stable railings I'd already constructed from ice cream sticks for my Iron Man: My Little Pony conversion.

Assorted spears, swords, helms and other ironmongery decorating the set are on loan from my Lord Of The Rings action figures, bulked out with gear taken from Gladiators, Predators and Klingons..oh my! There's an Apollo Lunar mission antenna on the roof and yes, that's a TARDIS in the background, which I'm told functions as a mobile telephone ringer module, which would be remarkably handy if I happened to have a mobile phone.

Originally I was thinking that this scene should be populated entirely with Iron Man figures but realised that the concept didn't quite work and decided that I needed to use a much wider range of toys.

So, the Players, from the left of the picture.

The Three Wise Men/Kings of Orient are Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Stephen Strange, the Fantastic Four's Reed Richards and kneeling, sans wheelchair (A miracle!), Professor Xavier of the X-Men. I've given them Lord of The Rings helms and cloaks, except for Stevo, who came with his own natty wrap. They have three attendants, Sylvester the Cat with his own Iron Man visor and chest mounted ARC reactor, Fone Bone from Jeff Smith's "Bone" epic fantasy comic book series, and Scrooge McDuck, who is obviously interested in cashing in on the lucrative ground floor of the future Stark Industries. Sylvester is wearing the Marvel Legends Series 8 Action Figure Modern Armour Iron Man visor. (Strewth, I was short of farm animals and Sly's a cat and that old tightwad Scrooge is a duck, fair enuff?)

Peeking through the left window are Third Class Nuclear Power Plant Technician Homer Simpson and an unnamed Camel.

Behind the railings is Bartleby, the young rat creature from "Bone" (ta to Patrick Goldsworthy for these two charmers!), Donkey from "Shrek" and Iron Pony: My Little Tony, for the construction of which see elsewhere in my photosets. (A rat and a cyberhorse...still short of mundane farm animals!)

The central group around the Manger includes the Great Inventor Wallace ("Wallace & Gromit", of course) playing Joseph of Nazareth, with mates including, Handy Smurf (I think! This one seems to be good with a wr

A pair of Scandinavia-based JAS1A Valkyries from SVF-15 in mid air, one in clean configuration and the other one with a typical air-to-ground weapon load: a GU-11 gun pod, two jet-powered Rbs20 anti-ship missiles with IR targeting system plus two 200mm rocket launchers againts hardened targets.

Another historic classic, another "child" of the late 70ies: an anime interpretation of the famous 'Fields & Meadows' camouflage, characteristic for the Swedish Saab 37 'Viggen' jet plane family (and also used on other Swedish military vehicles, but the Viggen is/was the most prominent one).

This weirdo idea had been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time, and when a friend of mine uttered the idea of such a color variant for a Valkyrie, too, I decided to start a kind of competion - for comparison purposes, to see how an individual interpretation of this unique paradigm on a Valykrie from both of us would look like?

The kit is, as usual, a simple, vintage 1:100 scale VF-1A Valkyrie Fighter from ARII. Since the livery would be the "star" of the kit, only minor things were changed/enhanced. Usual added cockpit details include a HUD, a pilot figure, seat belts and an ejection seat trigger. Some typical Valkyrie antennae on the outside were added, too, and the rudders re-positioned off of the neutral position.
Additional external features are a IR pod under the nose, small bulges in tne air intake area which are supposed to contain guidance antennae for the air-to-ground missiles (see below), and two outriggers under the vertical fins which contain a (fictional) radar warning system and a chaff dispenser. Viggen would frequently carry such equipment in external pods, so why not be more effective and integrate them into the hull?

Now for the camouflage scheme... that one was tricky. The colors themselves are already a riddle. I guess that anyone who tries to match the original colors through photographs becomes crazy at some point, because light and weathering make them look VERY different from machine to machine, and even from picture to picture!

The Viggen's proportions hardly match a Valkyrie, but I tried my best to apply the 'Fields & Meadows' scheme on the upper surfaces. But transferring a scheme from a fixed double delta wing airplane onto a variable geometry wing fighter just leaves lots of room for interpretation... After extensive research (and experience with two 'Fields & Meadows' Viggens in 1/72 scale in the past) I finally settled for the small Valykrie on:

Light Green "322M" = Testors/Model Master 1734 (Green Zinc Chromate)
Dark Green "326M" = Humbrol 117 (Leaf Green, FS34102)
Black "093M" = Mix of Humbrol's 33 & 91 (Flat Black & Black Green) in 1:1 ratio
Earth "507M" = Testors/Model Master 2008 (Raw Sienna)
Grey undersides "058M" = Testors/Model Master 2086 (RLM76, Lichtblau)

The Zinc Chromate sounds crude and IS very bright, but on the 1/100 scale Valkyrie this extreme green is O.K., esp. with the later black ink wash which tones down everything a bit. At 1/72 scale I would have rather used Humbrol's 80 (Grass Green), which is a bit "milder" and comes IMHO very close to the real life color.
Humbrol 117 for the dark green tone is a compromise, and IMHO still a bit too dark. During pre-tests I found more authentic but even darker greens like Humbrol's 116 (FS 34079), 75 (Bronze Green) or 30 (Dark Green) to be too murky for the small kit. 117 is already considerably "brighter", and this contrast was simply necessary for a good overall impression of the camouflage scheme - the dark green was supposed to stand out against both the light green and the black fields. I should have used RAL6003, but the way it turned out is still acceptable.
Instead of pure black which 'Fields & Meadows' is supposed to contain, I went for a very dark green, which also yields a slightly bleached look. Some pictures of real Viggen also suggest that the "Black" is actually a greenish tone.
Testors' Raw Sienna from their figure color series is a very good match for the Viggen's light earth color patches. Another, more common but also very plausible alternative is Humbrol's 118 (US Tan, FS30219). Again, pictures of real Viggen suggest a wide variety of light brown shades due to fading and light influences! The Sienna is more yellowish, though, so I went for that tone.
Finally, RLM76 for the undersides was a surprise find! Originally, FS36375 (Humbrol 127) was my choice. But when I checked other paints in store I found Testors' RLM76 to be a tad lighter and with a stronger bluish hue - exactly the look I had been searching for for this kit, without need for mixing.

The radar nose became semi-gloss black and the wings' leading edges were painted in flatr aluminium Markings were consciously left simple, trying to emulate the stern original Viggen look as much as possible, with no