Paint: No Place to Retreat

The Light, the dark and Destruction

Subassembly vs assembled

When you paint miniatures you’ll definitely someday stumble over the question: “Paint in subassemblies or completely assembled?”. For smaller minis you’ll often find a compromise - assemble most parts and leave out bigger blocks that make it hard to paint. 

For tanks and bigger pieces that gets already tricky to decide on. But for Dioramas it’s even harder. There are no dedicated assembly parts to glue later.  

The fence on the street in the zombie diorama is a great sample - It is created in enthusiastic building sessions, and when it comes to painting it’s somehow a kind of disruptive and it’s hard to reach the underlying parts.

But I’d personally still vote in most cases for “build before paint”. In most cases,  a diorama has tons of details- the hidden parts in shadow don’t play a big role when it comes to painting. But contrary, creating the proper structures in the building process make the difference. They support the decision process if a scene works or not. 

The sleeping bag and his buddy

Fortunately the zombie diorama didn’t contain that many occluded areas. 

With a fast wetblending, most of the structures like brick walls and sewers were done.

For the hideout, I thought about a strong light effect from a Campfire, because a campfire is the natural buddy of a sleeping bag.

Such light effects were new to me, and I just mixed a lot of yellow in my colors. Interesting that it came so natural as it's the same approach I still do for such cases.

I’d say the yellow is a bit over saturated with a few years' distance, but the general concept worked. Especially the experiment of cast shadows was tons of fun. And although not consistently executed - especially the zombie side is too bright - the effect was understandable.

With that set, I went to the zombie and felicity. Nothing very special - just add the right amount of yellow to  everything.

Even more voting was the top level. It should be sad and not deaf focus - gray gray gray. A little blood for the blood god as highlight and that's it.

Aftermath

Maybe the posts sounds a lot of moaning and pointing to mistakes - but it’s still one of the pieces I’m most proud of. Right after I finished it, I’ve read many books about Dioramas, composition and visited workshops on such topics, so I think I’ve grown a bit and am eligible to criticise my older ego. And still think it’s an impressive result that transports a story understandable by every viewer. 

The final photos were quite a challenge too. Getting everything in focus is hard, even for small dioramas. Maybe in future I’ll invest some time to learn image stacking - until then, these are the final pics: