Riddles In The Dark

live without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.

J.R.R.T, The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark"

This little piece, the M144 from the 'Personalities of the Third Age' series is a real gem among what Mithril Minatures has produced. It's a quite small vignette that captures the scene from The Hobbit where a hungry Gollum challenges the lost Bilbo in a contest of riddles. If Bilbo wins he is to be led out of the horrible tunnels, if not he is to be eaten. It is a scene around which a lot of the stories about Middle Earth circulates since it was here Bilbo found the One Ring and brought it back in circulation, so to speak.

[Click for a larger image]

The choice of setting for this vignette was quite obvious; Gollums lair by the cavern lake deep under the Misty Mountains. This kind of enclosed dioramas are ideal for shadowboxes, since they are confined within a natural ceiling and walls. The problem when I made it was to make it large enough for a cavern without Bilbo and Gollum getting lost in the scene. Another problem was that I had certain outer dimension already decided for the scene since I wanted to include it in a cabinet with fixed size slots. The cabinet contains different scenes from 'The Hobbit' and I definitely wanted this one to be a part of it. I finally solved it by buying two pocketsized mirrors, which I placed on the left side of the scene and covered the thin gap between them with a ceiling-to-floor stalactite (those are the ones that drop, right?).

Else from that, the framework was quite simple. The bottom piece was made from a very smooth piece of masonite, which was also going to serve as the calm lake surface. The ceiling and walls were made from loosely pressed styrofoam which I carefully brushed with paint thinner that melted the surface and gave it a rougher look. I covered the lake and mirrors with masking tape and than cover the whole lot with plaster spackling (acrylic plaster is less messy, but that was what I was stuck with). I also used the spackling to build up the beach to the right and to embed the base of the Bilbo/Gollum vignette. When the spackling had dried, the stalagmites, stalactites and other lime deposits were sculpted form plaster and epoxy putty with the help of pictures from a spelunking book. To use plaster for the stalactites worked really well since plaster tend to form cones naturally. In fact, plaster is pretty much what lime deposits are made of anyway.

I gave everything a coat of dark blue/gray, almost black and then by dry brushing it repeatedly with subsequently lighter grays I enhanced the rock texture and lime deposits. I removed the masking tape from the lake surface and gave the absolutely smooth, hard surface a couple of coats of satin black. When this was thoroughly dry I started to give it several very thin ink glazes of blue. This was finally given a coat of gloss varnish. I glued the coarse sand in place with white glue and just gave it a simple wash of brownish gray.

At this point I tried putting the painted miniatures in their intended place I noticed something was wrong. The black hole the lake now appeared as sucked a lot of focus form the miniatures and the scene looked very unbalanced. To counter this I decided to break the surface of the lake. First I considered jumping fish since they are mentioned in the text, but later went with rings on the water. Since I wanted to align the circles with the stalactites I dripped soapy water on them and put a 'x' where they fell down. Then I outlined a series of intervowen concentric circles on the lake surface, just like the sketch to the left. I managed to squeeze my hand into the box and do this reasonably well in pencil, but when it came to painting in the blue colors, this proved impossible. I finally had to break the blasted thing apart to free the bottom piece. So now heed my advice: always build modularly, never glue anything into place until you have to.

[Click for a larger image]

Since I am not comfortable being still with my hands when at home, I can spend an incredible amount of time making the most insignificant detail for my dioramas. The fish skeletons, orch thigh bones and skulls littering Gollum's island (it's on the left side, to dark to see properly in the picture at the top.) and the beach were made from paper, epoxy putty and brass rod by the coffee table as I was watching the news or old Seinfeld reruns. I guess I take after my mum, who has always been knitting before the telly. In the photo to the right you can see an orc skull and a part of a thigh bone. Details like this are put there to please the onlooker as he/she explores the scene.

If you have read the story you know that the glaring red light of the cavern entrance is grossly unthematic as Bilbo was captured in pitch black darkness. It is just a result of me and the photographer's (Jonas) messing around with lighting and filters. I am mostly a sucker for getting the details exactly right when I plan my scenes and often find myself correcting petty details on the miniatures I buy. In this case I'll put it down as 'artistic license', just like most artists do to cover their sloppy interpretations.

To the right you can see a 'meta-picture', so to speak, of our set up for the photo session. The whole thing was probably a typical example of a 'high tech/add hoc solutions' experiment since we didn't exactly know what to do and how to go about when shooting dioramas. Jonas, the photographer, brought a Hasselblad with a Polaroid backpiece for test photos, a 35mm Nikon with lots of swank lenses and add-ons, several spotlights on intricate folding stands and tons of film. (Perhaps I should put some correct technical info here. Mail me if you are interested and I'll ask Jonas to specify) But we had to solve a lot whit what we could find in my apartment: an old shirt hung before one of the spots as a green filter, aluminum lids as reflectors and books for propping up stuff. In the picture you can see something that proved really useful: a booklet of sample theatre light filters. The red light in the cave entrance was achieved by using a sample from that stack.

Some of my shadowboxes, like this one for example, proved to be difficult to shoot. We had problems getting light into the deeper corners of the cave. This is another reason why I would strongly suggest anyone to make shadowboxes modular so you can, for example lift of the roof of a scene or take out certain parts for repairs or photography. I always do this now; you as can see for yourselves in the 'Moria' and 'The Barrow' pages.

On a final bombshell, I'd like to comment on the double video case that can be seen behind the 'Riddles in the Dark'. It contains four episodes of 'Knowing Me Knowing You-with Alan Partridge', one of the funniest shows to ever come out of Great Britain (or anywhere else for that matter). I heartily recommend it.

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