Welcome back. I hope your wife is Ok?
That is some thorough testing there, and I fully agree that the textile is rather NOT what you want…
The ciggy paper does capture the creases perfectly however! And the powder paint is a good solution to matte the colour. Is that paint coloured, or do you creat the colour with the acrylic?
As for the face: she looks more as if she is frolicing about, than frightened… Maybe a rebuild of the mouth?
Thanks Erwin, yeah she’s gradually recovering & prognosis is very good. Glad you like the result, all the testing may seem like overkill but I’ve come so far now, I don’t want to eff it up with bad figures. What turned out to be the base coat was blue/white/black acrylic, and the top coat was using the same mix again with white & black powder paint added. It came out an accidentally lighter shade, I’m so used to the artists’ acrylics drying a couple of tones darker than when wet that I mis-adjusted, I forgot powder paint tends to do the opposite.
(Edit) Sure her expression needs work (or a Hornet), I kept thinking if I paint it right she might look…manic? enough but I doubt it. Anyhow that’s for later, I wish I could keep the coiffure as is too!
I can’t believe I’ve never tried mixing acrylic & powder before, it’s pretty obvious I don’t need X21 anymore to make anything flat 
Glad to hear/read/both (whatever)…
I know you won’t screw up, but each option doing a test run of 200 movements… That somehow reminds me of this :
I never heared about powder paint untill you mentioned it, let alone used it, so everything you tell is new…
Brilliant solutions as usual. Looks the biz. I would not go with a melodramatic expression though. Look at film from say, the folks running from the collapsing twin towers. Surprisingly little emotion showing. Unless you WANT drama. Then I would suggest just showing it around the eyes? Eyebrows “up” and eyes wide open. Actually the pop eyed look all of us try to avoid when painting eyes?
Anyway, my two pfennigs,
Good news about the OWMBO… Hope the progress continues!
J
Erwin aww didn’t they give you powder paint in Art class at school?
Thanks Jerry & quite right, shock/fright is more blank-face in the moment & I agree with Erwin the mouth’s probably all it needs, definitely not smiling. I can’t think of any of the main players eye-poppin’ apart from maybe Gabcik trying to make the Sten work. The civilians will be too busy ducking or running generally away from the camera, so those new Archer eyeballs wouldn’t be much use for my purposes 
Nope, but now that you post the picture: I know it from the Holy Phagwa festival. Just never laid the link.
Blimey Tim, you win hands down for the most scientific modeller that it’s ever been my privilege to follow, a real labour of love, 
. Though I think you might be focusing too hard on her booty, 
.
G
Now I can’t get th image out of my head of Tim with a home made crash test dummy kinda set-up watching his joint tests 200 times. Over and over. And over.
J
Go Tim, go!! try using latex on the inside only and try painting while stuck to the glass. Reduces that crepe paper look. Maybe a matte medium added to your paint.
Don’t say that! Now he has to do those 200 dummie test again. You’ll give him RSI!
Well guys all I can tell you is Purple Haze has 300 beats, so it didn’t take that long – the intro came into my head as soon as I started the stress-tests. Phil OK although do you mean the final images still look like um crepe? I know the early ones did - in any case next time I’ll paint the paper on glass as you suggested. Reluctant to use latex because it might thicken the paper too much to get sharp creases…? What I did already achieves extreme thin-ness with surprising strength. Matte medium’s still an option too, I found that while trying to get up to her booty with the cocktail stick (settle down at the back G!) the top coat did begin to flake off slightly.
Meanwhile, today I’ve finally got hold of a copy of “Seven Men at Daybreak” by Alan Burgess. It seemed worth chasing because it was written in 1960 and the author spent time in Prague in 1958 talking to some survivors/witnesses. However, I’m slightly suspicious because in his Introduction he says he can’t name them for fear of punishment by the communist govt. which didn’t want the publicity. Maybe true, but it’s also a licence to make stuff up with no sources named. Also, he was writing on the crest of that first wave of WW2 stories coming out in print & movies, when everyone started cashing in & the facts didn’t matter as much as a rattling good yarn.
And on cursory inspection that sinking feeling deepens - he wrote the book like a John le Carre novel with large slabs of invented dialogue. Also alarming are at least six references to a “green Mercedes” and at least ten references to all four main players packing “revolvers”. Not a good start, but I shall manfully wade through the crap because I’ve noticed a couple of passages which might clear up a couple of enigmas in the event itself. For example, remember those airborne uniforms? He says they flew up towards the power lines and then fluttered back down to the ground again – I’ve never read that detail anywhere else
It seems there are at least a few of you guys who are interested in the research side of it, so this one’s for you. “Seven Men at Daybreak” is a very odd book - to be fair Burgess didn’t have access in 1958-1960 to information that only emerged later, such as Pannewitz’s police report & CIA interrogation. It could well be that the secondary local Resistance members he interviewed (via translators) were the source of some of the half-facts & total fiction that have plagued researchers ever since.
The author makes a good job of the bare bones of Operation Anthropoid but he fleshes it out with entirely invented clunky dialogue to cover his apparent shortage of accurate detail, along with strange errors that smell like they were deduced from grainy photos or others’ verbal descriptions badly translated. If he ever actually visited the scene of the attack (doubtful) he didn’t seem to realise how much the site had already been re-modelled during the intervening 16 years. For example, he has Kubis wandering over to a phone booth (somewhere along the long chain-link fence) to chat with his girlfriend while they’re waiting at the bend for Heydrich to show up! No phone booth was anywhere near there in 1942, and in any case the whole idea he’d do that is laughable. Burgess clearly had a screenplay in mind & he eventually got lucky with that ambition, Operation Daybreak in 1975.
Other examples of mythical details: “the car purred smoothly over the tarmac” – no, cobbles in 1942; Kubis “wrenched out the pin…of the Mills grenade” – no, custom twist-top chemical-fuse bomb; Kubis runs to his bike and then ran with it between the two tram cars – hmm leaping in a single bound over the coupling, carrying the bike? No, he was running through the crowd to get to his bike over at the fence; if it had been close to him he could have pedalled off away from everything in the direction Heydrich’s car had been going. And anyhow he took Gabcik’s bike, his was left at the scene with the bag of spare bomb/fuzes.
Now Heydrich is taking pot-shots at Gabcik – no, his gun was never loaded; Gabcik is firing back – no, he never fired a shot until he wounded Klein later in the chase; Kubis fires several shots at nearby Czech policemen (who even fire back!) and tram passengers – no he only fired once into the air & no local cops fired anything apart from themselves; Klein is shooting at everyone – nope, his magazine dropped out at the first shot attempt. And a passing “lorry” slows down but the driver decides to hightail it away, then a “small baker’s van” is flagged down. Heydrich gets in the cab but the pain’s too much to sit, so he gets into the open rear of the vehicle to lie down. Huh? What use would an open flatbed be to a baker? OK flour sacks I guess. Whatever I think I’m on safer ground with the floor-polish van, who could have made THAT up…?
The four semi-auto pistols waved around that day (2 Colts, a Walther & a Luger) are described as “revolvers” no less than 23 times. Heydrich’s car is a “green” Mercedes 6 times. So, is there anything at all worth salvaging? Maybe…I like the idea of the uniforms dropping back down onto the street after the blast, sounds more plausible than remaining hanging on the powerlines. But given this book’s track record it’s more likely they WERE left hanging up there 
Always interested Bro , can’t learn unless ya learn me , besides reading your dissertations keeps me from having to look it up meself …
Brilliant work and history man !!!
Hi Tim
Talking about innacuracy, it seems to me that the French movie The Man with a Iron Heart (2017) ticks most of the boxes, if not all 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8hWFUbULZY
H.P.
Hi Tim, thanks for the history.
I don’t mean latex per se. water based, paintable silicone thinned quite a bit on one side (the inside) is what I recall. Curse word, I wish I wasn’t so far behind on everything else. I need to do a couple of guys in coveralls and this would be it to help with the Grand Illusion you are creating. Matte medium is what I put in the paint to dull it down. I didnt do everything on the glass, just the silicone and the cutting. Then, after cutting the pattern, I wet the paper side and formed it to the model. After that dried, I removed it from the model but you wouldn’t have to if you were ready to paint. Experimentation is the spice of life.
Thanks mate yeah I oughta publish & be damned
Ohhhh noooo…seriously?? Well, after a thorough analysis I found three accuracies: (1) the colour of the Merc (2) the colour of the sky (3) the Arabic subtitles.
My favourite comment, from a Mr Guzman: “I’m a history teacher and this is very much how it happened.” Kids - run away, run away now to the Library…but don’t look at Seven Men at Daybreak
Phil – OK gotcha, that’s kinda what I was going to try next. Except I’ll need to paint a pattern on more skirts so I’m thinking that’s best done before dressing. But hey jump those coverall guys to the top of your list, I’d really like to see your method in action
priceless, probably what would also happen if you sampled their donuts too. Bur ahhh now I understand - so you yanks took the “i” out of aluminium and put it between the “c” and “l” of nuclear! OK OK I know the English can’t handle the language much better, what’s with the “u” in every favourite word? I thoght I knew the answer
