Joe Berton writes: “For the Ichabod photos, we shot them in front on my Oak Park house, on Taylor Avenue. We did a number of takes, to make sure Shep got it right.”

SHEP’S NOTES ON THE DIORAMA

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” presented an unusual problem: This scene is so simple that it barely qualifies—in a purely technical sense—as a diorama at all. It is essentially a showcase for the two figures of Ichabod Crane and the horseman; there is little additional scenery in the box. In fact, but for one important missing element, the figures could stand very nicely on a base as a two-figure vignette. The missing element, however, is crucial: To succeed, the piece needs the eerie moonlit atmosphere that is only possible in a box diorama.

The figures were sculpted in epoxy putty and painted in oils in the standard manner. I did do some color experimentation with the horse and rider, both for mood and to vary the monotony of the black clad rider on a black horse. The cape and coat were painted in various shades of green with red in the shadows, while the horse was highlighted with various greens and browns. Background details consisted of the single tree (actually a root) in the background and a couple of large trunks framing the scene in front. The unfortunate schoolmaster is caught in midair, with the wire which holds him up being supported on an epoxy putty milestone. The owl on the branch in the background was a last-minute addition that adds a nice touch to the scene. The glow in his eyes is done with fiber optics which are nothing more than light-carrying plastic fibers that lead back to a light mounted under the scene.

Otherwise, the lighting is fairly straightforward. General moonlight illumination is provided by a single light mounted on the inner frame behind the blue filter. The jack-o’-lantern is a grain-of-wheat bulb, masked behind a thin screen of fiberglass insulation material inside the pumpkin.

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

J.D. Speaking of helping you out, one of my favorite stories about the research you did for your boxes was the way your friend Joe Berton posed as Ichabod Crane while you were working on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

S.P. I asked Joe to run down the sidewalk, and I still have the picture. The figure was inspired by my memories of the cartoon that Disney did years ago. Their Ichabod was wonderfully skinny, with a huge nose and a receding chin. The face isn’t Joe’s, but the body certainly is.

This is the only box I ever did with a galloping horse in it. I liked the drama of the scene, with the two of them coming straight out of the box toward you, the viewer. I also wanted to illuminate the pumpkin in the horseman’s hand. There’s a grain of wheat bulb inside the pumpkin.

J.D. By this point, you seem to be having more and more fun with the lighting.

S.P. That was the reason I was doing boxes.

J.D. Was sculpting the 100mm horse a challenge?

S.P. Well, fortunately, I didn’t have to do the whole horse—just the parts you could see! There are hind quarters to the horse, but I didn’t have to sculpt something that would look good from all angles; it only had to look good from the front. By then, I had painted so many horses, and a lot of what you learn about sculpting is actually learned from painting good figures. That’s why I always urge people to buy good figures to paint. If you buy figures for the subject even if they’re lousy figures, your mind eventually starts to accept them, and if you start doing sculpture, your sculpture winds up looking like them. Whereas if you paint only good figures, you learn your sense of proportion and animation from good examples, rather than bad ones.

This box was mostly done in A+B. I don’t think it had any cast parts in it.

J.D. I like the glasses flying off Ichabod’s face.

S.P. That was a neat touch. The rims of the glasses were soldered together, and I used liquid clear material to fill the lenses. The cord for the glasses is just a piece of wire, which allows them to fly up in the air and stand there.

J.D. When you painted a night scene like this or “The Remnants of an Army,” would you paint with the light in mind?

S.P. No. Usually, I would paint it as if it were daylight, then touch it up to get more of a night feel if needed. You can often do that with glazes.

J.D. I ask because some of the most impressive works I’ve seen at recent shows have been experiments in trying to suggest a unique light source just by painting it.

S.P. Yes, I agree, but I let the lights do the work in these boxes. I’d occasionally touch something up that just didn’t look right, but I didn’t do much of that.

J.D. Ralph Koebbeman told me this is one of his favorites.

S.P. I liked it, too. This was one of the few non-military boxes that I did—and one of the few non-historical boxes, too, for that matter.

Jim DeRogatis purchased this box at the auction of Ralph Koebbeman’s collection in May, 2023. Here are his notes on restoring the box and some images during that work.

Shep achieved that unique “night blue” lighting in this scene with the two fixtures seen above, each with two small incandescent bulbs and heavy (heavy!) blue gels. The fixtures themselves were rotting away, flaking little chips of white paint, but I cleaned them up and mounted my LEDs in them to replicate as closely as possible where he pointed the lights. I used much thinner blue theatrical gels, because his killed almost all of the light. You’ll notice the reveal is kind of lopsided; the construction of this box was a lot more slapdash than “The Nightwatch” or “In the Turret of the Monitor”; it’s a smaller scene, and one he didn’t seem to care as much about. For example, Ichabod has only one eye (but you only see one), and he didn’t sculpt the back of the horse (yes, it’s an original sculpt), pumpkin, or owl. The cardboard walls were just glued on to the edge of the base, although the back one had a thumbtack for easy removal to replace the grain-of-wheat lightbulb in the pumpkin. Shep just slopped the Celluclay ground work in place right up to the velvet-cardboard. He did put neat little staples in the horseman’s arm to hold the wire, however. I replaced the pumpkin’s light with an LED, and fastened an LED under the base in a brass tube to illuminate the fiber optics in the owl’s eyes. (You can see the fiber optics on the back of the tree below.)

 The horse and rider out of the box. Shep clearly painted for the blue light in this one—although he told me he didn’t—the shading and highlighting of the horse is with dark green, but it reads as black under the lights, as does the rider’s cape.

The inner scene, minus the back wall. A word about using organic material in a diorama: Don’t; it decomposes! That “tree” shed more crap than you can imagine, but it still looks like a tree, thankfully. He sculpted the two trunks that frame the scene in the front, and that was a much better choice.

The restored box (above), and Shep’s inspiration (below).