Like many of my box dioramas, this one started with an image (the film-noir-type shot pictured above) and an idea/challenge (how dramatic could I make the shadows, starting with the one of the man at the top of the stairs, then amplifying the one of the woman cast by the moonlight through the window—which I discovered as a happy accident, then decided to take full advantage of). Playing with shadows is always extremely tricky; believe it or not, I started with the man’s shadow being cast by a 1/48th scale figure, which was too large, then went down to 30mm (still too big), and 1/72nd (still not quite right) until I finally just sculpted a rough figure that was the right size, but which barely looked like more than a lump of two-part epoxy putty on the workbench. (See photos below.) Lesson learned: The shadow cast by a figure is very different than the figure itself, so as I often say about painting in a box diorama (paint for the light!), I have learned to sculpt for the shadow (whee!).

The shot above and those below show the evolution of the woman’s figure as well as the scene and lighting. The “marble” floor is a piece of varnished plywood, with the tile lines scribed in with a Dremel and the rest done with paint. The landings are balsa foam (ideal because you can pin and re-pin during positioning, finally filling and sealing once you’ve found the perfect place for your figure). The stairs and railing were both challenging: The former was based on a dollhouse staircase that I doubled in size and covered with thin sheet plastic, and the latter was scratched from aluminum tubing with solder wire for the decorative parts. In the photo above, you can also see my wire tree covered in Vallejo modelling paste, barely visible outside the window, but necessary for texture and more shadows. You can see also see two examples of the many (many) experiments that it took to get the man’s figure right, based on the shadow it cast. The walls of the scene are sheet plastic with some dollhouse moulding; the tin ceiling is a piece of embossed dollhouse ceiling painted and weathered. The nice thing about working in 75mm or 1/24th scale is that it allows for lots of detail; the down side is that there aren’t nearly as many accessories available as there are in 1/32nd or 54mm, though you can occasionally find some useful half-scale dollhouse pieces or G scale railroad parts, which at least provide a start for detailing and reworking. As for the rest, there’s always scratchbuilding!

Take One of the finished scene in the box can be seen above, but I learned another lesson the hard way with this one: In my work area, and in my library with the other boxes I haven’t sold, I had no problem whatsoever with room light impeding on the scene or affecting the shadows. Then I brought the box to MFCA 2022, which had fantastic lighting in the display room—for everything but box dioramas! The room light really hurt the affect I was shooting for, so when I got home, I extended the outer box and added a black-velvet-covered, light-absorbing reveal, as well as cutting down the size of the viewing window. I forgot, I guess, that the whole point of doing a box diorama is to control the light, so in the future, I’ll just assume there will be blazing spotlights above, and plan accordingly! (You just have to make the box a little bigger, which we all try to avoid, keeping in mind that three to four inches from the viewing window is almost always what’s needed to assure that no room light seeps in, though in some scenes, that is much, much less of a concern than others.) Onward!