The Blog about Diorama Clervaux

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Thanks for your understanding

Claude

By the way, I am working on the Villa hours and hours every day but I am just tiling the roof, so there is not a lot to show actually. Work on the book is going good to.

I have now 90 pages completes in a rough layout. There is a lot still missing, a couple of pictures from the castle (not a lot be assured), the whole last Modul including the Villa and a lot of other pictures. I will probably get 120 pages if not more.

A Layout is actually getting prepared. I did not see any test layout myself. I found also a distributor to help me get the book out to more customers.

The time line is still for a publication date in October, but for the moment I have so much of work with both the build and the book that I am not sure if I can make it.

That's what I literally do for the moment! Just this weekend I have done 18 hours of modelilng work.

As I have a tight timetable I need to go a bit faster then a hobby actually should. The last Blog post from march 13 showed actually a picture from the same day. This one is taken 4 days later

Here are all the individual parts to get all done.

The whole complicated part of the Villa is put together already a week later

A few more days of work to put all together and I will be able to start the roof work.

PS. My Blog is ofr the moment "again" subject to massive junk comments at a pace of 50 a day. So If your comment is labeled accidently as Spam (happened already) be not surprised that I will not be able to rescue it from the Spam folder. If it's important, please mail me.

No update does not mean no progress. I started detailing elements up to painting steps. There are parts impossible to reach later, so i need to get that done before. I am also turning in cycles regarding other parts like this one

A part the fact that the top is broken (in the mean time I had it fixed and broke again at least three times) i did not like the look of it. I have only one picture of this element , taken from far, but no, that's not what I have in mind. In fact, the grout filled the joints to much. What did I do?


Took all away and started anew!

After this update I am going to repaint the thing as the remodelling is already done. Of course you can't progress very well if you do everything twice!

But there is progress after all, just check this picture

Yes, thanks to all the buyers from all over the world who made this selfpublishing adventure a success, I am actively working on a second volume already. I will try to cover the path from raw material to the publication through the Blog, just holding back some names until all is set for sure.

The book will cover the whole diorama except the details about the castle. The castle' s front will of course be seen on a lot of photos because it's dominant feature. I will probably show 2-3 pictures from the back of the castle, overview style, not more in order to respect all those buyers of the first volume and just enough to put the whole thing in perspective and eventually spark the interest of new followers who might be tempted to pick up the first volume to.

But now comes the biggest question i had. What should be the content of the book? The history part of the battle is already covered in "Capturing Clervaux. A pure photo album was an option, but I am not sure it would sell well. Inserting Tips and Tricks is the way to go, but I am certainly not reinventing all the existing techniques and I also do not want to rehash modeling tips widely accessible on the Internet or in other recently published diorama books. What do I have to offer what could be somewhat unique?

Let's leave that aside for a moment.

For the publication of the first book i had tremendous help from my friend Paul from Iowa (USA) who transposed the script and layout I delivered in open source SCRIBUS software into Adobe Indesign and also worked intensely on the quality and appearance of the pictures I choose. Due to his job he made it also possible that i got professional proofreading (for the price of a drink) and some of the printing stuff done (pre-press and so). I was really lucky to have him. Unfortunately he does not have the job any more!

A big problem for selfpublishers is distribution!

I contacted certainly near to a hundred online modelling shops, was lucky enough to find 15 interested ones, but the most frustrating part is that only those interested answerd to the mails, all others ignored my inquiries! Very impolite! Why not give a short reply and say "No, thanks"? I found a few other takers during expositions, but there is certainly more room to grow.

Getting someone who does the layout for me and assuring a decent distribution, but still retaining myself the self publishing status, is a path I am pursuing right now. I am confident I found it already but am not yet announcing a name.

I finally decided to start writing some text and see where it would lead me.

Well, that is more easily said then done. The build of the lower part of the village, the first part i will cover, started in 2007! That's over 5 years ago already. Should I explain the build chronologically? How would I avoid repetitions?

I quickly dismissed the language question? I had a few potetial customers not buying the book because the do not have the necessary english knowledge. Being quadrilingual myself (if you allow me to count this english gibberish as speaking the language) i would be able to make all the book in german and french without relying to outside help. The problem here is the cost/income ratio. Doing the whole book in either of this languages is financially suicidale. I would barely be able to sell a 100 copy edition in those countries, but it is well known that the first 100 copies of a print job are the most expensive. There is always a fix cost in printing, the more copies you do the cheaper it gets.

Doing the text in the book trilingual would be possible of course, but this would engross roughly 20 more pages, ergo some 20-25 % more printing costs compared to the 80 page book it will probably be again. Everybody would need to pay 20 % more just for the few customers i would add myself! So I am really sorry for those customers but I can assure them that there are plenty of pictures to look at and if need would be I can certainly help them out with the text.

Ok, meanwhile i have completed over 50 pages already, sifting to 1000 of pictures, doing new ones, adding text, sorting and resorting, slowly advancing!

This post is long enough now, more later

Happy New year to everyone!

Did you do your homework and collect some firework sticks?

Ok, let's start this build of the Villa Prüm.

The pictures i have of the building either show the lower part of the façade or parts of the roof-work. It is also essential for a scale build to understand the layout of the building you are going to tackle.

That's why i normally sketch all the buildings before starting my work. In this case it was even more important as i had some spots on the roof i did not have any picture at all. I magnified all my pictures and used some old historic views to support my hypothesis. I magnified a publicly accessible version of a cadastral map who allowed me to get the approx. measures of the house. As the Villa is to build to fit in it's 1/35 version on my module, i am shrinking it a bit, so all the measures need to be adapted. Heights are done a lot on feeling and also by analysing the pictures, again.

Here is my sketch of the most difficult side with a chapel in the midst of the roof!



I did my best to do the perspectives somewhat correct, the most important thing was to get most features of the roof in there.

I also started to do the second essential help to build such a complicated building, a mock up made of cardboard. This is very important to get the right feeling of the measures.

Let's get this started then

After 2 years and 3 weeks of work (every day except holidays) i consider this module done. As you notice there is a bit of landscaping to do in front of the bridge, but this is only a few hour workload.

Ok, there is also still the Harley and his rider to finish and i may add a civil vehicle (a Citroën 11) somewhere but i intend to do those things during the next months. The fountain column is not written off also, i just want to get on now an start the last part, the Villa Prüm.

After all the doubts I had at the beginning of this module (water, tower sculpting, available space and lack of reference photos) i think the end result is not to bad.

Have a nice Christmas everyone

In an old picture of Clervaux i got a glimpse of a letterbox hanging on a house not far from the Hotel Central.

I contacted the local post museum to get some infos and they kindly send me this picture of an old letterbox


Here is what i have done to copy it

The letters are 1 mm Aber photoetch letters. As you can see i had no space to make the full text, I applied and glued the letters with Gloss Varnish. The post horn is made with Magic Sculpt.

I think this will make a great addition to the Bouvier façade or , nearer to the viewer, on the corner of Hotel Central, I will decide that tomorrow-

Sometime between all the other tasks i managed to work on the upper levels of the farm house, meaning i tested a lot of materials and colours to simulate hay and straw. I finaly set on the recently collected Neptungrass balls (see a few posts lower), using parts of the whole ball as base stack and adding on top of that a bit of coloured fibres. Dark Yellow for the straw and olive greens for the hay. The original colour of the fibres being brown, the resulting hue is more decent as it sounds. I fixed the whole stuff with glue from the rattle can.



and here is the front