Title: The Crow Date created: December, 2015 Description: A crow rests atop one of three tombstones in an old cemetary. There are small, barren, black trees scattered around. The tombstones are covered in bird poop, mosses and other growing things. Notes: This is a rework of my first diorama, untitled cemetary, using store bought gravestones instead of homemade ones. As such, I placed the tombstones in the same place and I used black fauna*. The crow, is of course a reference to the film The Crow, from which my original inspiration was born. But even without the reference to the movie, it does seem the crow belongs in this scene. The tombstones and the crow are in O scale and the diorama was designed to be displayed in a 7.3 cm x 7.3 cm x 7.3 cm display cube. * - I had wished to use black fauna originally but didn't have the knowledge yet of how to make it happen. These trees are the same twigs as from the original diorama, gathered along the gulch near our house, but I spray painted them flay black. In this image, the base is still soft clay. I have pressed the tombstones into the base to make the impressions and to make sure this is where I want them placed for the final piece. Taking it to the next step, I have added the trees: This pic was taken after I baked the base and adorned the tombstones with bird poop and mosses. At this point I had also glued the tombstones into their respective places. You can see some glue at the base of the leftmost tombstone. After placing the trees in the clay I took photos to record their locations for later and I placed them aside in the same relative locations they would return to once the base was baked. Nnedless to say, if I left them in the clay during the bake, they would have burned up. Because the trees are so delicate and because their branches would interfere with the application of the ground cover, I placed toothpicks into the holes in the base as placeholders. This allowed me to spread glue and ground cover around the [future] trees without filling in the holes where the trees would eventually be glued into place. As you can see, were it not for the toothpicks, the holes where the trees will go would have been lost in ground cover: Here is the piece in its display cube. Almost finished. I ended up painting the edges of the base black for the final piece. The finished work: Copyright (C) 2016, Thomas Vaughn.