Additions to the Site, November 2023

After the bounty of new box dioramas seen at the MFCA Show in May 2023, the MMSI Chicago Show in October saw just as many new pieces on display, including my latest, “Garbage Day” (my gallery is here and step-by-step images of the box in progress can be seen here); a scene of Napoleon’s army in Egypt by Michael Berger entitled “V. Denon with the 61st”; a new box by Bob Bethea, “Christmas Surprise,” and some subtle improvements to “The Truth is Out There: The Sheppie Files” by the great Dennis Levy, first seen at MFCA. (We box diorama makers are never done tweaking things for the better!)

The MMSI Show also featured a special exhibit of Shep Paine’s box dioramas acquired at auction and restored earlier this year, most of which were added to the site in the last update. But in addition to Bob Sarnowski’s great photographs of the Shep display at MMSI, I’ve added my account of the restoration of “The Death of Jim Bowie” here, while Jerry Hutter takes us through his repairs of “Mr. Christian!” here.

Finally, as always, there are lots of fascinating additions to the Various Artists & Newer Work page, including a Beatles box by Paul Schindler; a whimsical Old West scene in the style of Ray Anderson displayed at MMSI by John Werwie; a WWI flats box by Robert Blokker; a very ambitious Waterloo box, artist unknown, at least half a century old;  a pseudo-box by Jean Diorama; Andrea Miniatures’ new “box within a box” kit; some great links shared by Phillip Young and John Fraim; a vintage “mystery box” seen at MMSI; Mike McFadden’s “Rendezvous Over Bougainville,” winner of the Popular Vote for Best of Show at IPMS Nationals 2023 in Texas, and a very impressive Star Wars box by Masa Narit that Martin McClendon hipped us to.

As always, we welcome your contributions, and if you’re a box diorama maker who’d like us to create a gallery for you, just drop us a line: jimdero@jimdero.com, barry.biediger@gmail.com. Thanks!

Additions to the Site, July 2023

We have lots of exciting additions for our biannual update, starting with some by the grand master of the box diorama, Sheperd Paine. Freshening up his artist’s gallery was long overdue, and the tremendous score that Joe Berton, Darryl Audette, and Jim DeRogatis made at a recent auction of Shep’s boxes in Beloit, WI, from the collection of Ralph Koebbeman provided the perfect impetus. Visit Shep’s artist’s gallery here, and be sure to click on all of the new sub-pages for each piece, where additional images of the work in progress have been added along with some of Shep’s original diorama texts, his comments on the pieces from Jim’s must-own catalogue raisonné (Sheperd Paine: The Life and Work of a Master Modeler and Military Historian), and Jim’s chronicles of restoring 11 of Shep’s 25 boxes with new LED lighting, wiring, modern transformers, and minor repairs to assure that the boxes will look fantastic for another half-century. Many of these boxes will be on display at the annual Chicago Show sponsored by the Military Miniatures Society of Illinois on Oct. 20-21, 2023, so make your plans to be there now!

The Beloit auction also yielded a box by Rev. Spencer Van Gulick that Jim restored and added to his gallery, and another by Philip Stearns for which he did the same. And Joe had acquired a beautiful box by Peter Twist at the MFCA show in 2022, and that has been added to his gallery, along with some in-progress images of that restoration. Several other boxes sold at the Beloit auction have also been added to the Various Artists & Older Work Gallery, and we’ve also posted photos there of two dioramas by Lorado Taft at the Kenosha Public Museum, courtesy of Martin McClendon.

Meanwhile, we’ve been thrilled to see quite a few box diorama makers active in this century! We’ve added some great photos by Penny Meyer of new work seen at the 2023 MFCA Show by Peter Culos, Dennis Levy, Jon Harbuck, and Jim Rice, while others are chronicled on the Various Artists & Newer Work page, along with some boxes recently seen at The Ontario Model Soldier Show, and some recently found on the Web. Penny also photographed a new box by Andy Axtell at the 2023 show sponsored by the Historical Miniatures Society of Northeastern Oklahoma.

Finally, we’ve received some great submissions and created new artist’s galleries for David Aquino, Gerard Joria, and Warren Jones, and added the latest to the galleries for John Fraim and Ingvild Eiring. Thanks as always for checking out the site, and look for the next update later this Fall after the MMSI Show.

Additions to the Site, December 2022

First up, we’re excited to have created new gallery pages for Italian modeler Francesco Terlizzi, French modeler Richard Poisson, Norwegian artist Ingvild Eiring, and the celebrated Norwegian diorama builder Per Olav Lund. In the existing galleries, we’ve added the latest by our friends and fellow box enthusiasts Jon Harbuck and John Long, and the site’s co-editor Jim DeRogatis has added two more boxes he built in 2022 to his own gallery page. Several photos of recent (or recently unearthed) box dioramas have been added to the Various Artists Newer Work page, including work by James Rice, Joris van Os, Ogan Akinci, Lorenzo Bernardin, and Mike Lynch, in addition to the results of the “Box Diorama Challenge” by the Plastic Crack Podcast Facebook Group. We’ve also added photos that Joe Berton found in an odd listing at Sotheby’s for “A Pair of Frog Dioramas, Probably French, Late 19th Century.” A fan of the site in the Netherlands made us aware of Dutch diorama builder W.G.L. Wieringa (1889-1973), and we’ve added some photos of his work to the Various Artists Older Work page, while on the Feature Articles page, we’ve added a “new” old piece, an epic chronicle of the construction of Brian Courtney’s box “Billeted on the Peasants,” and a fun piece on kids’ enduring love for shoebox dioramas that we’d missed last year in The New York Times. Thanks as always for taking a look at the site!

Additions to the site, June 2022

UPDATES TO THE SITE, JUNE 9, 2022

First up: The founders of this site have all been busy, and you can see Jim DeRo’s newest boxes, “Seven Steps” and “Night Raid, 1945,” on his artist’s gallery page; Barry Biediger’s latest, “Beyond the Seventh Moon,” on his page, and Darryl Audette’s “Glory to Ukraine” in his gallery, each with links to additional views and notes on their construction. Jim and Barry both won gold medals at the MFCA 2022 show for their boxes (and Barry was further honored by being named a Grand Master), and several other boxes were also on display at that fantastic show, including Dennis Levy’s latest, “Unconscious Distortion,” a tribute to René Magritte, which can be seen on his page; Joe Berton’s “Van Gogh’s Bedroom,” with a new lighting scheme since it was first seen at MMSI 2021 (it claimed a gold at MFCA as well); the first of what we hope will be many boxes by Peter Culos, “Theatre of Spoil and Destruction” (he’s got several others planned already, so we’ve added his own gallery page); a box called “The Plague” by Bob Huryk, which can be seen on the Various Artists page, and a very promising box-in-progress by Michael Scarborough, “The Philosopher’s Study,” which we’ve added to his gallery page (perhaps prematurely, but it sure is beautiful!). Richard Mason has another fantastic airplane box added to his gallery page, with an accompanying step-by-step overview, and we’ve created a gallery page for Gareth McGorman, who has yet to build a box, though he rightly claims his photography set-pieces as “box-adjacent.” We added another new gallery page for Hervé Dagès, a French artist who is a retired Brigadier General of the French National Gendarmerie and a graduate of the Special Military Academy of Saint Cyr created by Napoleon in 1802 (not surprisingly, he is fascinated with the First Empire); in addition to sharing his debut box, he compiled a great step-by-step article. Also added to the Various Artists page of recent work are two finds from Facebook (with very little known about either artist); six examples of the work of Jean Diorama, a great diorama artist who’s tackled a few pseudo-boxes (and who was recently featured on an episode of the Sprue Cutters Union podcast), and some of the work of Andy Acres, a London-based modeler who specializes in small eerie scenes in boxes, and who we first became aware of through this article, while Mike Pierce submitted two photos of a unique Civil War diorama in an ammunition box at the Tennessee Welcome Visitor Center, which we’ve added to the Various Artists, Older Work page. Finally, we’ve added a couple of new pieces linked from the Feature Articles page, including a useful glossary of electronic terms submitted by Noah and Selena McCoy, a piece on the 1979 box “Beyond Tourcoing” by Geoff Barnes, a new photo in the article about the Tonka box-diorama-in-a-box kits, and, if you scroll to the bottom of the article about the restoration of Shep Paine’s classic “Gun Deck of the HMS Victory” box, an update about the latest round of repairs Jim made in May 2022 to keep that classic ship-shape. Thanks as always for visiting the site and clicking around!

Additions to the site, November 2021

It’s been more than a year since this site was updated, and we have plenty of great additions that have accumulated during that time. Sorry for keeping everyone waiting, but, well, there were more than a few distractions until recently (few of them good, starting with the most deadly global pandemic since 1918; ugh!)

First off, this site’s two primary editors, Barry Biediger and Jim DeRogatis, have launched a podcast, Small Subjects: Big Topics About Miniatures & Modeling, which you can find here. It’s not only about box dioramas—we hope to cover a wide range of topics about miniature sculpting and painting, along with interviewing the top artists in this field—but, of course, given our primary passion, there’s talk about boxes, too. We hope you’ll give it a listen! (In addition to the link above, you can find us streaming on all of the major podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple, and Overcast, and we are hosting a blog for the show with images we discuss in each episode on this site here.)

We are always especially happy to add new artists’ galleries to the site. For this update, you can find additions fromMMSI President and veteran modeler Joe Berton, who just did his first box diorama this year, “Van Gogh’s Bedroom”; a fun gallery for creative (and monster-movie-obsessed) Australia modeler Alain Lunke; a gallery of the the classically-inspired boxes by Victor Wong, and the first box-diorama efforts by Italian modeler Antonio Marcello, Pennsylvania modeler Gary Sausmikat, and South African modeler Richard E. Mason.

New boxes have also been added to several of the existing artists’ galleries (at least everyone was busy during COVID!). These include the gold-medal-winning “Nevermore” tribute to Edgar Allen Poe by Bob Bethea; Jim DeRo’s latest box, “Samhain,” which won a Silver Medal at the MFCA Virtual Show in 2021 (there are also new and better pictures by Bob Sarnowski of “Adieu!,” which claimed a Silver Medal in historical at MMSI 2021, and “Witches to their Sabbath,” an MMSI Gold Medal in fantasy in 2021); Greg DiFranco’s newest lighted flats box, “Saint George and the Dragon”; Nick Infield’s new box “Ray Harryhausen and Mighty Joe Young” (along with a photo of his first box, “Napoleon and Berthier on Campaign”), and the latest by Andy Axtell, “Daniel in the Lions’ Den.”

Finally, we’ve added two very nice boxes by an unknown French modeler to the Various Artists page (and any info would be most welcome!), along with two pseudo-boxes that Jim Rice displayed at the 2021 MMSI Chicago Show, and in the Feature Articles section, you’ll find some great photos of museum dioramas that come from the blog run by modeler and diorama enthusiast N. Kalis, who chronicles these pieces in his blog here.

Thanks as always for clicking around, and we hope you enjoy!