Painting and Birding 'round the Long Island Sound

At last, some more diorama work!  This is the kind of thing that makes the day-job worthwhile.  As this is the first diorama project I've done while having a blog, I intend on documenting the process as fully as I can.  This first installment will introduce the project, run through the planning stages, and continue into the first stages of construction.

The Bruce Museum operates a seasonal nature center at Greenwich Point, the town beach.  It is a lovely location and a known birding hot-spot, also known as Tod's Point for the former owner of the property.  Tod's mansion burned down long ago, but another structure remaining from his time, known as the Inis Arden Cottage, still stands and is being renovated by the Greenwich Point Conservancy.  Part of the plan is to move the Bruce Museum's Seaside Center, which had formerly been housed in a run-down building serving also as a concession stand and life-guard station, into a portion of the Innis Arden Cottage.  Most of the space will be devoted to large aquarium tanks in which local marine life will be displayed, but there were two awkward old cupboard spaces on either side of a stone fireplace that began to be considered as possible diorama cases.  I was brought into the discussion late last fall and over the winter various ideas were discussed, resulting in these early rough sketches.

These sketches are admittedly biased towards birds-  I paint what I know- but trust me, by the time I am done I will be well familiar with crustaceans, algae, fish, and plenty else!

The space is not large.  I've done dioramas big enough to park an SUV in, but these are more the size of phone booths.  The same proportion too- narrow and tall.  I proposed a scene that split the waterline so that they could depict life both above and below the water.  As they were to be a pair, we toyed with various ideas but eventually settled on one depicting summer (when most visitors would be there to see them) and winter.  They would depict actual, identifiable locations at the Point, and focus on the food web and the interactions between the various organisms that call the shoreline home.  At this stage I was referencing taxidermic specimens that the museum already had in its collection, but as a budget finally materialized I was able to be more selective with species and work out more dynamic poses, contracting the services of master taxidermist George Dante.  At this point I had to get a real sense of the space limitations we were dealing with, and get a handle on the third dimension.

I produced these two models scaled at 2 inches to the foot.  I really wanted to build the actual dioramas in place  (the idea of going to work at the beach every day had its appeal!) but because of the ongoing construction I finally had to accept the idea of building them back at the museum as portable units, and these scale models were designed also to illustrate how this would be done.  Each would be built inside a box, and the painted backdrop would be on a curved wall.  Instead of having the back wall also arch overhead in a half-dome as many dioramas do, these remain cylindrical to the top- however, the top edge is not flat, but cut at an angle, so that the back of the case is higher than the front.  This feature will make them difficult to install but is essential to the illusion of space within the diorama; viewed from the front through a restricted rectangular window, the edges of the backdrop should not be visible, giving the illusion of space continuing beyond the frame.

This is perhaps easier to explain by this picture of the full-size diorama, which includes the framed-out front window.  When installed, this window will be imbedded in a solid wall, and the lintel over the front window will have concealed hatches to allow maintenance of the lamp fixtures, which light the dioramas from above.  This basic structure was inspired by the similarly proportioned dioramas in the "Small Mammals Corridor" at the American Museum of Natural History.

The curved back is made of 1/4" bending luan.  This is the winter diorama, which has a partial background painting under the water as well.  I've "bumped out" the lower, underwater portion of the curve, creating a shallow shelf to support the back edge of the eventual artificial water surface.  Rockwork will fill the empty left half and support the water on that side.

And here is the summer diorama, with the structure for the rock work well underway.  The narrow groove running horizontally across is where the water surface for this one will be supported. The rocks above the water line are removable to ease installation.  Next step- covering the background with canvas and the foreground with hardware cloth and mache.  Stay tuned!