I finished the Gökçedağ diorama a few weeks ago! That was the mystery diorama, no trace in the blog :)

See more pictures here : Gökçedağ

Gökçedağ diorama completed

Painting the boat was the usual wet on wet technique, complete with (very few) Mig pigments, I did it in quite a short time compared to the wall bit. That's a mostly gallery post  but  there is a trick after one or 2 pictures

Russian PT boat 1/35

So have a look at the picrture and what do you notice? left side is grey, right side is yellow, how does it come? that's not only because the outdoor line came from the right, no, it's because *in my diorama, the light will come from the front*. Actually, the boat will be oblique relative to the scene. So thanks to my airbrush and a few hours of cork I managed to recreate this effect of light. remember that for me a diorama must come with its own light embedded and not rely on external sources of light to work..

That is most visible on the bellow picture

Russian PT boat 1/35 Russian PT boat 1/35 Russian PT boat 1/35

And now here is a preview of the diorama. That's right, it just needs a few groundwork as well as painting my wife and last but not least, do a good sea!

Diorama preview Russian PT boat 1/35

2 hours and the half spent to paint roughly 10cm², would you believe it? and yet..

so that's after the first hour, half of the work on the small detaily porch are painted, but that(s nothing compared with things to come

Starting painting the walls of regulus

That's it, after 2 and the half hours, and hundreds of acrylics glazes, a few pigments melted with paint, and more washes..

Of cours there is a direction of the light here.. though not that obvious. I want the wholme to be taken in a luminous fog.

Here is another bit of wall I done during last week.

really I couldn't work so much in the shed with those temperature -at 0°C i tend to drop things a lot and that already cost me a diorama two years ago.

Anyway here is the setting for the Regulus diorama.

the diorama setting

One very important thing I do is that I *never* set up the definitive dimensions of a diorama as long as I didn't tested it with all its elements in place. because I don't want big empty spaces or that the diorama could appear totally crowded.

Anyway, during that lapse of time where I didn't touch that one I changed the setting and the different elements composing the diorama: exit de self portrait and the torpedoes.

here are some other views

More about the regulus diorama setting

Extra details on the plaster walls

After having doing all those fortress walls, I needed something finer to complete my the stoney parts of my diorama. And then you can't beat those late XIXth century ornaments. of course there is no way i could sculpt them in plaster, by rather making a form agin. So I assembled a few plastic bits and sculpted this out of Duro.

sculpted wall with duro

Then I did a silicon form -blame my poor camera

silicon form for plastertry to avoid the trapped bubbles! use an old brush to push the plasetr in every detail..

And in the end you get that.. quite nice :)

plaster sculpted