Gotta love a great diorama!
There’s something about a well-crafted diorama that epitomizes the craft of modeling. Don’t misunderstand, I am impressed by freestanding models and that’s how I finish most of mine. They look great and capture the essence of the aircraft, vehicle, ship, or figure. But a simple display base with basic groundwork and a figure gives the model context and a sense of scale. For example, a beautifully painted and weathered F4U-1 Corsair always looks cool, but placing it on a base with a surface that looks like a crushed-coral runway with bare-chested ground crew shows the kind of grueling conditions under which many of these fighters operated. The height of the art form are those carefully crafted scenes that, whether they are simple or complex, tell a story. The best of them require…