Through a glass, brightly

There are many things we can only see “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12), but now seeing my little figurines while I’m painting them is not one of them anymore. I had painted the animals as best I could without really being able to see the small details, and thought they had come out pretty well, all things considered. But when it came to painting 1/72 scale people, I just couldn’t make out the details well enough. Clothing I can manage, but hair? Eyes? Mouth?

I tried the handheld magnifying glass I had bought years ago as a prop for my son’s spy-themed birthday party, but it worked much better as a prop than a useful tool. I tried my husband’s lighted page magnifier, which was some help but not enough, and anyway there was no way to hold it in place while painting. I considered a visor-type craft magnifier like my husband uses to have (until it broke). But the one I picked is a tabletop magnifier that goes up to 10x in the main lens (depending on how far I position the figuring from the lens) and up to 22x in the small auxiliary lens. It wasn’t supposed to come until Friday, but today at lunchtime it landed on my doorstep.

The one downside is that now I can see all the imperfections in how I had painted the donkeys. Of course, I don’t plan on setting up the magnifier for anyone to inspect my finished diorama too closely, so I may not try to repaint them – I don’t want to make them worse in the process. After all, while I can see the details better now, but that doesn’t mean I can manipulate the paintbrush well enough to paint those small details as well as I’d like. But at least now I know where to try to paint the eyes and mouth.

goats – actual size at left, magnified in center

chickens

Peopling a Bible-times diorama

Last year I started a new hobby, making dioramas. My first project was from the world of fantasy. There being no objective standards as to how a dragon’s cave should look, I was free to choose a shape and size that suited me. If the sword and the crown among the jewels in the dragon’s hoard appear to have come from vastly different-sized men, who is to say one did not come from some race of giants?

But next I decided to attempt a first-century Jewish house, such as might have been found in Bethlehem or Bethany. I had once thought about making a model of such a house as a visual aid for Sunday School or Bible studies, to show what it might have looked like for the men taking their paralytic friend up on the roof, what the upper room make have been like, and where the animals may have been kept (and where a manger might have been repurposed by a young woman who needed a place to lay her newborn son). At the time I felt such a project was beyond me, but now I have decided to tackle it.

There is no lack of information on the internet about what such houses might have looked like, including drawings of them. From a simple “four-room” house to much larger structures with interior courtyards, I had so many to pick from I spent months just trying to decide on a model. Finally I found one page which describes using the findings of archeology to construct more historically accurate nativity scenes. (As it is in Spanish, you may not be able to appreciate much besides the pictures. But it reminded me that part of my initial interest in dioramas grew from my fascination with the elaborate nativity scenes I saw in Spain, generally modeled more on typical Spanish village scenes that those of first-century Israel.)

I’m not sure yet how to construct the walls or roof, but more challenging was how to provide realistic figurines to make the house an image of family life, not just some ancient architecture. There are lots and lots of figurines in a variety of sizes for dioramas of various scales. But it seems that most people re-creating scenes in miniature are either doing military scenes (of wars from throughout history) or model trains (meaning they depict scenes from the last two hundred years). So most of the figurines of ancient peoples are fighters, and most of the people from everyday life are relatively modern.

At one point I thought the best I could manage was some native American figures, as I found a kit including women grinding meal and weaving cloth, probably not so different from ancient Israelite women except for style of clothing (and as the figurines are unpainted plastic, I might be able to hide the differences with paint). Then my husband found a kit labeled “The Folk of Judea 1 B.C. – 1 A.D.” How much more accurate could I ask for? (Unfortunately there is no one grinding meal or weaving cloth, however.) And I also finally found a set of the farm animals I had been looking for (but which always seemed to be out of stock when I tried to order).

I haven’t tackled the human figures yet, but I’ve been enjoying working on the animals. They are all 1/72 scale, meaning a 6-foot-tall person is one inch high. It’s difficult to get the tiny details – but that also means the details are small enough that it won’t be obvious where I couldn’t get things just right.