This box is in the collection of Darryl Audette 

From Sheperd Paine: The Life and Work of a Master Military Modeler and Historian by Jim DeRogatis (Schiffer Books, 2008)

J.D. With “The Son of the Morning Star,” you returned to the idea of the ghosts, but you were even more ambitious this time, with a ghost vignette of Custer’s Last Stand. Did you want to see how much further you could take the ghost concept?

S.P. That was part of it, but I was also challenged by having the ghosts in the sky. To me, it’s an interesting mood piece: It’s probably twenty or thirty years after Little Big Horn, and the grandfather, who may well have fought there, is showing his grandson the battlefield.

J.D. A lot of modelers have done Custer’s Last Stand, but you found a way to put a twist on it: It’s like a diorama within a diorama.

S.P. I used the same trick with the half-silvered mirror, but in this case, it runs horizontally across the entire back of the box, at a forty-five degree angle away from you. The ghost figures are actually positioned horizontally in the overhead, with their heads away from the opening. When you see their reflection in the mirror, it turns them right side-up. The base those figures are standing on is covered with black velvet, like the sky, and the figures are painted white. The light is hidden in the overhead.

Then there are the twinkling stars, which are actually behind the glass. Those are fiber-optics. I wanted to get some depth to the stars and the sky, and I did that by having the fiber optics projecting through the black velvet at varying lengths. Some are flush with the black velvet, while others stick out as much as an inch, with the rest somewhere in between. As the viewer moves his head from side to side, he senses a shifting relationship between the stars. Now, with real stars, it’s obvious you can’t shift your view that short a distance and see a difference, but I wanted a sense of depth, and it worked.

J.D. The mound offers a great way to frame the scene.

S.P. Well, it’s not a mound, it’s a large hill. I’ve been out to the battlefield in Montana, and the diorama is set in the area where most of the bodies were found. This is one of the few boxes I did that uses forced perspective, with the tombstones getting smaller as they go up the hill. The actual depth of the hill is maybe two to three inches, and it’s maybe five inches high, but it looks higher and deeper than that.

J.D. Generally speaking, you didn’t like forced perspective, did you?

S.P. Forced perspective is tricky to work with, because you have to be careful that the illusion isn’t destroyed when seen from the wrong angle. One of the most effective forced perspective boxes I ever saw was one Hans Reuters and Greg Volke did from Star Wars[1]. They had a box that was maybe two feet deep, and they got a wonderful feeling of depth by varying the size of the figures from 100mm to 30mm. Their forced perspective worked beautifully, because it had a very restricted point of view, but that was the only way to achieve the sense of depth that makes the scene work.

J.D. The 7th Cavalry figures are beautiful, Shep. After you’d sculpted them, you didn’t feel a twinge of regret about painting them all white?

S.P. No, I thought, “At least I don’t have to paint them!”

An interesting historical note on this one is that the Indian is probably a Crow, not a Sioux or Cheyenne. The Little Big Horn battlefield is on a Crow reservation, and the Crow were the blood enemies of the Sioux, so they served as scouts for Custer. It’s interesting how the political perspective has shifted, so that today’s Crows side with the Sioux, not with their ancestors who fought on the other side.