11/ Throwing Bill Horan’s book out of the window and doing bases. (how being a stingy diorama builder costs you some time as well as some money part 2)

There are a lot of things that makes me smile in the small world of model making, but the bases some painters use to display their figures always made my top 3.
Some don’t seem to realize that by doing some odd choices they distract the attention from their sculpted/painted work.
Some will just screw the colours of the whole thing while displaying a dull tainted soldier on some very brightly coloured wooden base, some simply seem to not be able to cope with the fact that they’re doing some miniatures, so they choose some grossly oversized bases etc..
Generally speaking, it is sometimes sad to feel behind the handsomely painted figure, the very basic lack of taste of the painter.
I even threw up Bill Horan’s book out of the window the day I read his rant about some pricey rose wood he uses as bases.
But then all this made me completely overlook the real problem.
It went like that.

One friend sent me some pics he took by himself at SCAHMS 2007. Amongst those was the piece that won “best of show”. A 54 mm guy posing in his plane’s cockpit, the kind of stuff that moves me one without touching the other.
“But” said that friend “you should have seen this huge great one piece shiny black base”.
I laughed.
But then he insisted quite a couple of times about that particular issue before dropping “anyway, the diorama is the base”.
And here some bell finally rang in my thick skull.

I just turned 90° from my chair to look at my shelves and have a look at the bases I built for my dioramas.
For years I always been using the same golden tinted wood to do them –the kind of stuff you find at 3€ in every Do It Yourself kind of supermarket, and fell strangely inadequate.
Would my obsession of not spending money while doing my dioramas be my downfall? Same thing for the borders of my dioramas that I tend to throw together in 5 minutes because I am in a hurry to start the next project etc.
So I decided to hit hard with Koktebel. The diorama was finished and I already had tested the outcome on several English and Spanish language forums when I got really depressed.

One evening I went to the garden shed where I had store the diorama, fixed some sandpaper to a wooden plank and proceeded to wipe out the crappy balsa frame and to thin the diorama’s border of a few millimetres so that there would be some sharp edges and limits. I then realized that the diorama was standing too high on its base –I wanted to do something quite flat so that the thin lines of the boat and the smallness of the kid would be valued and here I had obviously half an inch of thickness that was not necessary to the final outcome.

So I proceeded to carefully wipe that amount of thickness from the base using some modelling knife –which was mostly easy as the foam I use as a base was soft –but then I had to take a lot of care of not breaking the thin limits between the sea and the sand.
The next week end I proceeded to cut some new borders out of plasticard, I then put some Tamiya mastic and sanded them so that no joint could be seen, and applied one last coat of resin with a brush so that there would be no transition between the sea and the plastic borders. I also applied some last coat of my tainted sandy mix here and there so that the joint could be perfect. After this I eventually went to a nearby carpenter and asked him to do an oak base for the diorama. I then glued the diorama on it and it was finally finished 4 months after I started it.

10/ Conclusion

Often when I read some models SBS, the writer often make it sound like it’s easy. I don’t think so, if you want to create good stuff, the main ingredient you need is complete dedication, you must believe in what you do.
I don’t joke with my dioramas and I don’t take them lightly either, it’s so much more for me than just “having fun” like I read in forums. Indeed, by choosing themes that beyond the appearance of things are very close to my heart, and also by letting the ideas evolve by encapsulating my everyday feelings in my work, I ensure the fact that i will stay in focus for the whole build, that the idea I have in my head at month X will be actually done out of different ingredients some months later.

Now I happen to really like this diorama. First, except for a few Royal models bolts it’s been done entirely by myself with no help by any manufacturer. It is also conform at rule n°7 of my 10 propositions for better dioramas, I mean that it’s a real 360° diorama, that you can turn around it, photograph it under every angle, it will work.
I must say however that I am pretty pissed of at the amount of money I have been spending to build it –the whole clocking at something like 100€ which is more than I have been spending on dioramas the previous year.

If I don’t tolerate anything that has been built by others in my dioramas, I certainly need technical, historical inputs as well as good quality plans because I am totally devoted of any of the aforementioned qualities/stuff. Once more internet saved me on that one, so I wish to thank PetrOs whose plans and translations from the Russian language were a bowl of fresh air in a sea of doubts, MSW’s Wolves, staff and Piers for encouragements and even quotes (thanks Ion), my HF friends, but also Modelwarships, Solodioramas and Steelnavy forum members for their very great support. Special thanks to Charles Reading and Pete “mechanical genius” Vill.

So of course “Koktebel” is not perfect, my lack of nerves shines through a couple of issues: the kid has obviously not being sanded enough, it took me ages to come with a half decent base but I am sorry to say i don’t care much as I always think of my dioramas as being some works in progress, that will probably get updates every two years until I am totally satisfied with them.

Now matter how hard you will check, there is not the tail of one offensive weapon in this diorama. So maybe my son when cleaning my stuff in hopefully 50 years time, will have a look at Koktebel, will *not* find it gloomy* and will *not* throw it in the dustbin –I won’t be there to see anyway.