by Marco Scheloske

The most remarkable scene for me in “Aliens” is the fight between the alien Queen and Ripley. It was sooo cool to see her in the Powerloader unit when the blast door opens... and Ripley began to fight the monster to save Newt... mother vs. mother!

I tried to catch the spirit of this scene with the diorama shown here. Not as an attempt to re-create it like shown in the movie, but combining the real world and the fictional movie world - like “do you know what your DVDs are doing when you are asleep?”.

To do so I took a DVD of “Aliens” and Konami trading figures of the Queen and the Powerloader as a starting point. The Queen was altered a bit in her pose, I removed the seams with Aves apoxy paste and painted those areas with Testor`s “Black Chrome”, followed by a complete drybrush of the whole figure with Citadel`s “Chainmail” and “Mithril Silver”. The slime dropping from her drooling mouth was sculpted with Micro Crystal Clear.

The Powerloader has been more modified: I altered the pose of the legs by cutting and replacing them - they are a bit more apart now. The most obvious change is the addition of all the hydraulic tubes (20, to be exact), made from thin black wire and glued into small drilled holes.

The clamps are made out of soldering tin, bent into shape. The figure got an additional wash with dark grey oil color and a drybrush with bright yellow, silver and white. Oh, and of course its overall yellow color is the reason for qualifying it for this contest...

The display is the real DVD-cover. To create the burst DVD-label I scanned the original and printed a label. That label was glued onto a CD-blank, then I cut through it with a very sharp blade. Now I was able to carefully peel the label AND the thin silver layer of the CD from the clear disc. The result was glued onto the backside of another blank CD, ripped into stripes and pulled up in the area of the Queen, so that it looks like she broke out of the DVD and destroyed the label while doing so - and you can still see the rainbow-reflecting silver layer of the disc underneath her.

To show that the Powerloader is heavy I scratched the label in the are were it stands to simulate a cracked surface, caused by its weight.

The two figures were glued into place, facing eachother, and finally the sign with Ripley`s famous line was added at the front: "Get away from her, you bitch!"

And? Do you know what your DVDs are doing when you are asleep?

Image: Front, Queen's side

Image: Ripley's side

Image: Lots of hoses added

Image: Heavy

Image: Front view, low

Image: From behind

Image: Scary monster!

Image: From above