Darryl writes: Here is my 1/12 scale box diorama of the caretaker’s suite and boiler room of a time-worn 1950s New York hotel. They are two separate rooms, but in one shadowbox, dimensions 5’ high, 35” wide, ad 9.5” deep. A local miniature group came up with the plan to have construct a four-story hotel, each room being done by a different modeler, I was assigned these rooms in the basement. My scene depicts a widowed caretaker in the same hotel where he and his wife once lived, a few blocks from the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang. The once opulent room has become distressed. With this scratchbuilt double shadow box, I wanted to work with as many textures and lighting opportunities as possible, using different materials. All lighting is LED, color-corrected and modified from 3volt batteries to a 12volt main transformer, with the use of added resistors. All painting is done with acrylics, oils, gouache paints, and glass paint, each giving a different effect. The five-foot-tall front facade of the hotel is several layers of wood, moldings, carved foamcore, and then several layers of different paints: enamels, acrylics, and caseins, with marble dust and Micro-balloons for snow.