Title: The Valley of Steel Date created: May, 2015 Description: A preacher stands on a mound preaching to a flock of sheep, although it appears that none of the sheep are interested in the sermon. Although none of the sheep seem interested, one of them does momentarily give his attention to the preacher. It is not clear whether this is from some kind of mild curiosity regarding the sermon, a blank regard to something out of the ordinary or just to be polite. Notes: Created using a baked clay floor (Sculpey). In this case, I placed the sheep and the preacher prior to the bake. I took a photo of the scene in order to replicate the placement of the players after the bake. (Baking the clay with the sheep and preacher present would melt them). Scale is HO. Base is 9.6cm x 9.6cm. This piece was designed for the softball sized display cube (9.6cm x 9.6 cm x 9.6 cm). In the next image (a back view) you can see that none of the textures for the fauna have been placed and the clay has not been baked yet. The predominant color of the final landscape dictates what color clay I use for the initial modeling. Or, if I don't have that color or don't want to use a large amount of that color, I will paint the land after the bake. In this case, you can see I mixed brown and green for the ground. After I removed them from the clay, the sheep and the preacher left little foot prints that were still mostly present after the bake. Between the pictures I took and the little footprints, I was able to replace the characters after the bake and then finally apply the ground cover and the bushes. Here is another front view. This image shows the scale and the final placement in the display case. Copyright (C) 2016, Thomas Vaughn.