To The End (Revisited)

 A couple of months ago I mocked-up of a concept to expand one of my micro-dioramas 'To the End'. There is some background to this scene in Diorama Developments - To The End back in 2021, but to summarise it started life in 2016 as a 140 x 70mm scene, later expanded to 220 x 70mm. With it's home in the display cabinet no longer available I have started work to develop a larger scene. 

My initial though had been to go up to the 15" x 6" (375 x 150mm) format of 'The Headshunt' and 'Beck Bridge', but it has actually ended up a little smaller in order that it can fit into a 9 litre 'Really Useful Box', with an available height of 210mm. 

The new base is largely recycled and offcut materials, very much in the style of my 'Up-cycle' projects of a few years ago. On the underside of the board the constructional style can be seen, the corner pieces came from a pre-cut set of parts cut for a diorama board some time ago, but had to be slimmed down to suit the new board size. The extra block of timber along the top edge corresponds with a block on the surface and together are intended to provide a solid area of timber to drill to accept a wire-framed low-relief tree. 

The original diorama had not been fixed in place in the first picture and as can be seen below was shifted in location a little before the final fixing, just to give things a little more room to "breathe". Landscaping is now under way with corrugated card (cat food box) doing most of the work at this stage to create the layers. The track has been extended off the original scene and to ensure there was continuity between old and new I actually replaced the rails up to the existing cosmetic fishplates. The new track required packing to level it using some thin card.

DAS clay was used to smooth out the levels in the landscape and where possible start the blend between the old and new. I accepted that I would lose some of the existing ground cover as part of the process of blending in the new, indeed a lot of the hanging basket liner grass was trimmed right down to accept new materials on top. Having gone to great levels to create new levels in the ground, a lot of it isn't hugely apparent in the end but I am happy in the knowledge that it isn't flat! At the top of this image the area for the tree to sit in is the flat patch where the plywood is showing through.

More soon...

Colin