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1/ The Family Bore
Maybe some of you saw that very funny-yet-moody totally great 2006 American movie called Bubbah Ho-Tep.
At one point the old man just died and the daughter is there, checking at his stuff.
She falls on his Purple Heart, has a glimpse at it and throws it in the wastebasket.
Now guys, what will happen to our beloved dioramas when we will all be resting in peace?
I am living in such a world that I fear it could be totally alien to other people, that what I am doing and the possible beauty that I can find in my dioramas just could appeal to nobody else than me and the dozen of people that cheer me up every time I post some stuff in a forum.
I have no illusion about what will happen to my dioramas when I pass out, and stupidly, I happen to care about that.
Now I remind my great grand father, a Parisian seller who fancied himself being an artist –and indeed he was a quite gifted porcelain painter. He painted hundreds of them.
So it's been a few years that every Christmas, my mum tries to slip me one or 2 plates alongside more useful stuff in my yearly loot. Why does his stuff is being passed from generation to another while the Purple Heart ends up in the dustbin? Hey that's because great grandpa painted birds, nature, women with red faces and big asses running through fields… timeless stuff, stuff that pleases to women.
So maybe I found a goal with my dioramas, if I were about to disarm them, maybe they will turn me into this century's family bore? maybe I would still be somewhat reminded in 2100?
2/ A walk in the park with Aivazovski.
At the time I started this diorama, I had just finish a very big one of the “A bridge too far” kind.
Even if it ended being quite satisfactory, the amount of time and energy I spent building it was certainly too much I could afford. So I decided that one would be a walk in the park, something very simple, yet a bit new and daring.
First I wanted to do everything by myself in that one –which would have include the figures- and to use all my abilities to create outstanding water.
One evening while checking at my reference books –which include more painter’s monographs than Osprey-like books, I dig out one of my favourite, about Russian painter Ivan Aivazovski, a guy that devoted his life to paint the sea and the boats on it.
Now this XIXth century Russian painter is a bit of a hit and miss in my opinion.
His best paints (“The Seventh Wave”, “The Black Sea”) certainly reach Turner’s kneecap, but a lot of his work is just a bit too much affected for my own tastes.
But then there’s a big Something about his work. This guy knows the sea. He paints them with colour and movement. Man he’s been there… But then a lot of his colours are the powerful ones that you get at dawn or sunset and there is supposed to be no way that you can reproduce that in a diorama as you can’t display any background unless you build a shadow box around.
And it’s by thinking about this problem with the help of very good music that I decided that I would simply bypass it. I would make a sea shore –probably complete with a boat- but still I would use the warm colours that you get on summer’s evenings...
3/About a diorama being first an idea and then finding a suitable vehicle to go with it and not the opposite
Wanting to use a kid that would be at the middle of the scene, I needed a very special kind of boat, it had to be *thin* like an arrow so that my main character would not be crushed visually by a lumpy sloop.
Then in remembered the very first page on my book about Russian Torpedo boats, which shows a couple of very thin wooden boats with some kind of pole at the front.. After some enquiries in a forum, a nice modeller sent me very tight looking plans taken from a Russian magazine showing this really fine XIXth century boat called the Folly which I immediately visualized as a very handsome wreck.
Doing the plans for the diorama afterwards was a walk in the park because everything had to be done scale wise according to the kid that would be at the middle.
So that would not be a big diorama because, however empty it could be, the eye would be invariably attracted with some other details otherwise. So I set up for a 22cmx16 base which would be perfect. I then used my desktop printer to get a few top views of the Folly which I cut with some scissors and proceeded to arrange the scene so that the whole could look okay.
My first idea was to do some kind of first plan/middle plan/ background kind of diorama. Here it would have been sea /kid and boat/ sand as a background.
But then I already had done a diorama with the same shapes some 10 years ago, and remembered the reasons why I wasn’t totally happy with it.
First a diorama is not a painting; it’s a 360° object which should be viewable from every angle without any effort, so the idea to put a background would be certainly very bad because it would have close the view of the spectator from one side (maybe 3 if I wouldn’t be careful), and it was something I totally wanted to avoid.
So I choose to arrange the totality of the elements, sea, bits of boats and sand so that those could kind of revolve around the kid, just like he was at the middle of a semi-chaotic scene.
Then as I wanted to create a special light effect, I choose a colour setting –the waves would be deep blue with the tip of the waves being of a much lighter shade –with maybe a little bit of red. As the sun would be setting, the bottom of the landscape would have rose-purple shades while the higher ground would have a nice yellow-orange sand tint.
The boat would be clearer on the top than on the bottom, while the light would be coming from the sea. The kid’s shirt would have to be white so that this colour could stand up near darker shades, especially the blue of the sea.
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