I must say, 101st airborne, it seems that your dioramas look better and better, each time I see them. With the sewer diorama, I do suggest adding trash and other stuff. Mabe some wine bottles (both broken and in-tact) as well as newspapers and posters both in the walkway next to the water in the sewer, as well as accually in the water, as in floating in the flow of water.
I also looked at the photos of the diorama with the T-34, and I’m very intreagued and interested. Please post a thred on it here,too. I can’t wait to learn more about it.
Lookin’ sharp, Ryan. I’ll echo the comments - that sewer is too clean - put some trash and stuff down there, fill it up with… crap… figuratively speaking of course…[whstl]
101st, I had posted about the rats early on…if you’d like a couple, send your ground address to ajlafleche@comcast.net and I’ll put a couple in an envelope to you. There are more in the set than I’ll need. If you feel you need a reference to make sure I’m on the up and up, check my bio and contact Rob Grovonius who posts here and bbrowniii and dupes who’ve both been to my house.
Hey 101, I would suggest watching The Third Man, which ends up in the sewers of Vienna. A great film and some good reference material too.
I made this Boston-based manhole cover for a project…I wonder if you were not able to make something more prototypical for the manhole cover. They are usually little works of design-art in themselves.
Vespa boy- your manhole cover looks great, mine is much simpler than yours.
Everyone - I added some garbage to the sewer, here are some pics. I added Testors dull cote to the figures but they still seem shiny to me. Nothing is glued down yet so if you think I should move it please tell me.
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This is a rat that I made out of sculpy clay. Something looks wrong to me but I can’t figure out what. This has not been baked yet so I can still cange it.
Dio looks great, as for the rat,I would say maybe use wire for the tail instead of clay, that way you can get it thinner and then I would trim down the nose, head and ears, It looks armadillo-like now, But excellent work!! Looking forward to seeing more of your ‘talent’ !!
Good effort on your rat. I think his proportions are a little off - legs are too long, butt needs to be bigger, the nose is long relative to the rest of the body, and like tonka said, try using some thin wire for the tail (you could coat it with putty to bulk it up a little and taper it towards the tip). Take a look at some pictures of rats online to get an image in your head.
One final thought - actually two: first, remember that sewers are pretty nasty places - I’d add a lot more grime and crud and junk down there. Second, you can have a dead rat, but I’d have at least a couple that are alive as well…
Good work so far! I agree with what everyone has said about the rat, I also think it may be a little bit too large, almost cat sized.
As many have pointed out as well, the sewer is a dirty place, so it may be a good idea to dirty up the men a little as well as their surroundings. Trudging through a dank and nasty tunnel full of nasty substances would put a little grime on the boots and pant legs of your Germans. Just a thought.
As I went back and looked over your most recent pictures, the thing that jumps out at me is that, absent the ladder and manhole cover, your sewer does not really look like a sewer. It looks more like a street and the Germans are on the sidewalk, maybe in a tunnel or walking under a bridge. The poster on the wall on enhances that feeling - I know the sewers got a lot of use in the war, but I think that poster would serve you better crumpled up on the ground.
Again, I know this point has been made before, but if this is a sewer, particularly one in a wartime city, with a battle raging, it should be NASTY dirty… and like oddmanrush said, anyone in it is going to be dirty too…
Yes, the rat is a little on the cat-size of the realm, but I have read stories from a book about police stories in where an NYPD officer went to clear a basement, and a rat about the size of a baby ran across his foot and the room.
So yes, while rats of that size are not common, they sometimes do exist.
(If you doubt me, get the book Funnyist Cop Stories Ever and I can tell you, the story is in there)
That might well be true, but it muddles up the story of his dio. The whole point of a dio is that the viewer should be able to ‘get’ the story at a glance. Is he trying to tell a story about the huge rats in the sewer, or is the trying to tell a story about city fighting during WWII? It is possible that he could use a really large rat, and incorporate it into the story, make it a bit of ‘comic relief’, but he would have to rework the layout considerably, in my opinion. Because the RAT is not what this dio is supposed to be about.
Well I think viewers like to look at things that they can understand and be familiar with. Where an abnormally large rat may exist, like you said, they aren’t common and therefore would be rather unfamiliar in the eyes of a regular person, and would probably be seen as unrealistic or as Boyd said, comedic in a way. In each person’s imagination, one can bring up the image of a rat and compare it to what they see here and if the pictures don’t fit, I think that would detract from the overall appearance of the scene.
Its similar to what I did in my Pirates diorama with the fish. The wrong color makes it look a little cartoonish and ends up being distracting.
A lot of things in art and especially modeling relies on context. A tank is just a tank, but add figures and now you’ve created scale, dimension, story, drama, in a way that most people could relate to. If something isn’t quite right about one of these aspects, it’ll take away from the overall effect of the diorama.
I think he is on a good pace for making a great scene, I just think the rat should be scaled down a wee.
I never thought of it that way. Then again, I never seen any rats before…
(I’ll look up some photos, and I’ll see how large the adverage one is. I’ll admit, with rats, mice, and snakes, I don’t care which type, or size, they are as long as I don’t have to deal with them.)
I made the sewer much more dirty and I will take the poster down, I re-made the rat and I think it looks much better. I will take some pics and post them soon.
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