My name is Jean-Bernard André, I am French, I was born in 1970, I speak English and a little German and always liked to be on my own.

After having messed up with bits of cardboard during my first years, I created my first true diorama one day of September 1979 with some Airfix 1/72 soft plastic figs and a cardboard made British Churchill tank complete with static grass used for railway modelling. This started a long series of mostly world war two 1/72 dioramas that ended up when I found out that this kind of warlike hobby was really unfashionable with girls, so I wisely slipped to Science fiction stuff, I was still probably seen as being stupid but at least not dangerous any more.

I built my Games Workshop figs and dioramas for quite some time, but then around University I started to really slip from conventional scenes to more abstract stuff using some Prince August Middle Earth figs. I eventually found out that I could kinda empty my mind and express a lot of feelings in my dios, and I started to literary pour my life into these.

From purely historic or movies inspiration, my ideas I found while listening to music. from 1/72 or 1/48, I finally switched to the 1/35 scale when I realized that it was the perfect scale for human drama.

I then realized I wanted a complete freedom with my dioramas; relativize the whole idea of "accuracy" and generally speaking suffer no artificial limitation in my hobby.

Back after the military service, I started to build dioramas in 1/35. The mood of my dioramas had significantly lifted during those years but a rather chaotic life led me to cast a dark shadow over my work which quite a few years later is still there.

At one point (after Abbey and the 2 subsequent ones that I still didn't photographed) I fell I was reaching a dead end as the quality of my work plummeted. So much indeed that I put the 2 last of the series to the dustbin. So I stopped modelling.
This was fortunate as I had to change town and learn stuff in order to pay the rent in a better way than before. Though the pause ran for 5 years from 2000 to 2005, I never really stop to model in my head, so when i started back again the new ideas were there, there was new tricks I had devised and my will was further fed with a lot of revenge.
My ideas had evolve. Indeed I tried to get more subtle about those. I realized I didn't like any more being tagged "SF" or "ships" or or whatever, my new world was to be set in some historical past but *slightly* warped. Guys into SF would like my stuff because of the otherworldly moods, guys into boats or whatever would like the dioramas because I am dead accurate.

I indeed discovered that the people tended to focus on inaccuracies and miss the real things I wanted to show. In the meantime I started a process which would lead me at some point to stop completely relying on products available on the market models or figures.

These days my main goal is to completely evade from the traditional modelling schemes as ultimately I would like everybody likes my dioramas, that it could go beyond simple historic rendition, or even well mapped science-fiction. I want to create moods, and that those moods could appeal to a much wider public than the modelling world.

As for today, my views toward my hobby can be summed up in 10 propositions :

 

1 -The diorama is everything modelling is about, it's the meeting point of the manufactured object that is the model and the human input, you can and have to- tell stories with dioramas.

2 -When doing your diorama you should not be influenced by any trend or by any fellow modeller for you will only reproduce pale copies of originals.

3 -You should instead be influenced by EVERYTHING; a trip in nature, archive footages, paintings, music you should never consider this list to be closed.

4 -If you don't have a good idea to start with, or know you won't have any, wait for one to come.

5 - tuez pour l'ambiance. If nothing shines from your diorama, you miss your point and just picture an assortment of junk and people.

6 -You should remember that a diorama is a 3D thing whose advantage is that you can turn it around and get different perspectives of the same scene. You will therefore make an effort to not close the view of any part of it.

7 -You should remember that the nature surrounding a panzer is equally as important as the panzer.

8 -You should buy a book about artistic composition which will help you avoid scattering the work in pointless details.

9 -Whenever dealing with war you should treat it with conscience: you should remember it's a sad thing that destroys a man, even if he survives it. Avoid above all any temptation for historical revisionism -even slight.

10 -You should try to do something you can be proud of and remember that a diorama may be seen as some piece of art if your input in it is strong enough.

Here are 3 extra ones that I came up with during summer 2010.

11 -Never loose time detailing stuff that nobody will see afterwards for you want to show a project in its globality

12 -Never use anything out of the box, this being a product or a technical trick somebody else got.

13 - Don't spend more money than you should for dioramas because you will be tempted to use commercially available shortcuts which will damage your creativity.

By the way, I wish to thank all those people that say I am an artist etc, that's not true I am not (yet). I suppose that as long as there is a taste of blood or death in what I am doing I can't be considered as such, the day I reach peace of mind and really create some uplifting things, then perhaps, but not yet :)