Diorama of a French city station

Still wrestling with the nature and execution of this project.

From the very start, I had a very strong image  of what I wanted to create: an impressionistic diorama of a mainline station embedded in a busy French town towards the end of the 1950s.

In particular, I wanted to avoid that paradox of slavishly incorporating perfectly scaled and highly accurate models (buildings especially) that still ended up looking like "toys".

My solution was to be a loose approach to construction and painting that did not purport to be accurate but nevertheless created the illusion of reality.

But, I became aware of another approach to solving the "toy-effect" problem and that was "weathering" - see earlier episodes of this blog.

Weathering aims for  hyper-realism and is the polar opposite of impressionism.

I feel caught between these two opposite approaches - must they be incompatible?

Here are some pictures of a French chap's layout which has achieved what I want to achieve through the weathering approach.

The model people are far too glossy and plasticy - a weakness I've noticed with many layouts - but the rest is very impressive, especially the night-time scenes.


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Scandinavian music:

One of the first classical records I bought - as a teenager and on somebody's recommendation - was Sibelius 5th Symphony along with Karelia Suite and Findlandia. These pieces are still favourites 4 decades later.

Generally, I like Scandinavian music, especially the electronic music of the last 20 years.

GusGus are from Iceland: they will provide this afternoon's listening.