Landscaping in Place, Now We Paint and Decorate

 The diorama is currently in my work room, for the painting job to begin. Today I worked alone, as Marilyn has a stomach flu, but we hope to get together on Friday, if the flu is gone. The trees are in place, and they have bits of snow in the angles of the branches. The woodpile is also in place, as are two of the sap buckets, with more to come on the other large trees. 

The painting process in a static diorama starts with marrying up the background and the foreground. At this point, the back edges have their first coat of paint, with some faint dry brush accents in the pale mauve found in the background photo. The next step will be to add grey-beige shadows, and try to dry-brush the edge of the foreground to blend into the background. It is far too white right now!

Marilyn built up the ground with foam chunks which she then covered in crumpled paper, using a glue-type product that brushes on. On the right of the photo is a path, which she gets to mess up with "footprints" and sledge tracks. There will be an ashy, melted, sludgy area around the fireplace, and then we get to dirty that with snow, ice and ashes.

Once the background is painted, we can begin to place the larger items, gradually working towards the front of the diorama. I knitted a tiny toque today, which may hang on one of the branches of the small tree on the right side. Now I have to go hide the diorama in our guest room overnight, because if I don't, our cat will move right into our tiny forest clearing....