Well hello again everyone. Hope you are enjoying modeling as much as I am right now. Time for a quick update, as I have been quite busy with the building and the painting and the building and the painting... you guys get the picture.
I am probably going golfing tomorrow as it is supposed to be +10 Celsius and the golf course at Picture Butte is open now, so I took some time this afternoon to hit a few balls at the course where I work. We are going to open mid march most likely so i should have plenty of time to finish this project before I have to start putting in the 12 hour days. On the plus side the course looked pretty good for the meager amount of snow we got this winter.... I have my fingers crossed.
anyway back to the business at hand. I managed to get the walls primed and the crown moldings done while I waited patiently for the # 248 quarter round to arrive at the hobby shop. I went at 1 PM. before my trip to the course and picked them up.
while I was waiting I put some more debris around the courtyard and did some more coloring of stones and bricks etc on the church.
While I have modeled the church in partial destruction, my goal was to keep the damage to a minimum. I did it more as a way of cutting the building off at the back of the frame and not so much to portray it as a bombed out building.
It was more along the idea of allowing the interior to be viewed without having to build the whole church. So unlike a factory building or a bombed out housing project where the debris would be piled high I chose to keep the debris fairly low key, just enough to suggest some hits on the church, but not enough that the damage would render the building unusable.
Again my entire reason for building this diorama was to practice and regain some skills I thought i once had, and to get accustomed to the new order of modeling. The game has really advanced over the past 30 years. I wanted to do a lot of little things to hone my skills so i have lots going on but nothing too fancy I think, lots to look at but nothing overpowering everything else.
Well that is my hope anyway.
Here are some views of the interior:
just some filters, washes and pastels left back here, then the addition of the radio tables, the piano and the book shelf on the main floor and the bell tower superstructure in the bell tower.
Still haven't decided just how many figures will be in the rear of the diorama but I will have at least 3 soldiers in the tower, one kneeling looking through with binoculars out the top of the right side louvers. another running up the stairs toward the top and another on the ladder or shouting down from the landing at the base of the tower down to the radioman at the table.
I also hope to have a guy playing the piano, apparently unaware or unconcerned with the action going on around him. Just lost in the respite from the hostilities and caught up by the melody I guess.
here are some views of the courtyard after the addition of the first stages of the new debris fields:
I have added some thickets, or saplings near the courtyard wall, they will eventually be placed on both side of the wall along the whole length, with some flattened into the broken through section as well:
Here is how it will look with all the major elements in place:
And lastly here are just some more detailed views of some of the elements involved in this project. I hope you all enjoy my efforts.
A note about the colors because my photography skills are not high.
I read somewhere a long time ago about the way one should model with the same type of eye on perspective and coloring as one does when they paint. What I mean is that you should take into account scale and depth of field when you model and especially when you paint. Let me try to explain it for those who may be unfamiliar with this theory, and please if I don't explain it correctly and someone else can get what i am trying to say please jump in and re-explain it for me.
the basic principle is that as we look at something our perspective of it changes as we get farther and farther away from it. As we retreat from an object it appears to loose detail, it appears to get smaller, and generally it appears to loose intensity of color. Things tend to blend into each other at distances of only a few yards, well maybe a few dozen yards.
when we are building in scale we see this in the amount of details we are naturally able to distinguish. The larger the scale, 1/6, 1/25 Etc. the greater the detail, because we can get closer to it in scale. What i mean is this. If I am literally 6 inches away from a 1/6th scale figure it is like I am standing only 3 feet away from it, but in 1/35th scale that same 6 inches is the equivalent of almost 18 feet, so what I will see from 18 feet is much less detail than I would see at 3 feet.
So I say all that to say this. While planning this work I took this perceptual theory in mind and because I know that I have intentionally forced the viewer to look at the details of this diorama from a distance of at least around 18 to twenty scale feet and at some points closer to 40 scale feet I chose to mute most of the colors and keep them within a very limited color palette. Mostly light browns and tans and muted because of this theory of scale, almost blended into a singular image. There are of course pockets of color to attract the eye, but i again hope that the end result will be one of harmonized color and scale effect.
And with that i will let you all get back to viewing the photos.
