The top-down image above offer a good view of the overall layout of this year's National Model Railroad Build Off diorama. The main idea driving the design is the flow across the scene from side to side, primarily left to right, interrupted by elements that break that flow. Elements that run from one short side to the other are the lakefront, the track and the road. Elements that interrupt that motion are the bends in the road, the stream and bridges crossing it, and the trees. The houses and larger trees at the back of the scene are adjacent to or behind these longer, sweeping elements, and are almost interesting background features in and of themselves. More on them in a moment.
Let's start with the water. Since Woodland Scenics Deep Pour Murky water and a plate girder bridge were two required elements in the product bundle, it made sense to make them primary features in the design. I placed the bridge front and center with the water making a V towards the bridge. The small 'surface rocks', also required, point along that V toward the bridge. (Another line of surface rocks points toward the concrete arched bridge, but it is secondary to the railroad bridge and serves another compositional purpose).
The last required element in the product bundle was "Aunt Lucy's House", a two-story wood house kit by Walthers, (nee Faller). This structure might get its own blog post, as there's much to talk about there, but the topic for this post is about how to use the design of the diorama to highlight the required elements. To draw the eye to Aunt Lucy's house I put a bend in the road and placed the big white house at the end of it. I then put parallel elements in front of it which reinforce its location, connecting the street to the track to the fence to the driveway and finally the roof of the house; there's even a line of surface rocks between the track and the fence. See the blue lines in this image below:
Note also how the other house on the left relates to the curving road, track and lakeside over against the strong parallel lines at the farmhouse. In "reality" the home would have been the last thing built - the lake being there first, the track coming next, the road after that, and then the house. But for the purposes of the design composition it is the most eye-catching large element on that side of the diorama, and the shape of the elements in front serve to reinforce its location.
As I implied in last year's analysis of my diorama entry from 2022, balance is important. The weight of things influences how the viewer sees the scene. So far the discussion has focused on a top-down view, but this year I added more vertical gradients to the diorama. The lowest elevation is the lakefront and stream, and the highest the ground level under the mission-style bungalow on the left. However the tallest structure is still the white farmhouse. The paved road is the only leading line that changes elevation; it is above the track on the left, level at the crossing, then below it on the right.
Finally the trees play an important composition role. There is one more (broken) horizontal line on the diorama - the trees across the back. I had originally planned to include a printed backdrop but decided late in the construction to omit it. I had even considered using a small mirror to give the illusion that the stream extended back further into the distance but disguising it with a tunnel of trees would have changed the overall feel and balance of the diorama, putting too much weight in the center instead of out front on the bridge.
I firmly believe that nature, whenever appropriate, should dominate our modeled environments. Big trees should be big, maintaining the relationship to other structures, trains, people, etc. as they do in reality. My Bald Cypress trees are 60-70 feet high; this is about average for this species, but still tall enough to cast a long shadow over their surroundings as a model.
The palm trees dotted throughout are mainly there to set the locale but also serve as punctuation marks, places to interrupt the flow and keep the eye in the scene a bit longer. As painter Ian Roberts notes, strong lines across a composition tend to take the viewer outside the scene, so elements that keep the viewer in the scene need to be placed to do just that. It would be easy to follow the paved road right off the right side of the diorama, but that big Cypress says "Stop!" and keeps your eye at the lakeside "beach".
Thanks for keeping your eye on this longer blog post. I hope these thoughts inspire you to consider design and composition in your modeled worlds.
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