Monday, December 8, 2014

Stone Slabs Street Showdown - my first full size scratch built diorama, inspirations

Hi everyone, I am back :)

I had been posting these on WAMP forum but I didn't get a lot of interest,  but I'd still post it here to see if I can get some more interest here.  So at this moment the diorama is already half done and on to painting the characters already.

I always wanted to do a full scale diorama, but never really have the courage to do it.  This time around I got a lot of motivation from the Umbrella Revolution movement I got inspired and put this idea into action.

Well this is only my first stab at building something this big I made quite a lot of mistakes, one of the biggest mistake is that I haven't thought the whole thing through before going on to make it.  I did made some sketch of course but that didn't help much.

Anyway, on the the topic first.

It all started when I came to the understanding that any mini diorama basing should not only have a good base, enough stuff to support the miniature, but a good diorama base should have stuff UNDER the miniature, BEHIND the miniature and even ABOVE the miniature: ie, levels.

So I figured that there's a street here in Hong Kong that is famous for it's stone slabs that should be perfect for a good base... slowly the basing idea became a diorama idea...

To date it's still an early stage project but it's slowly coming together...

The official name of the street is Pottinger Street. It is a street in Central, Hong Kong, which better better known as the Stone Slabs Street (石板街) by the locals, named after the granite stone steps which are a rarity nowadays in Hong Kong. The street was named after Henry Pottinger, the first Governor of Hong Kong.




There is actually a Air Raid shelter under this street, but was later covered up with stone slabs. Originally I thought it would be really cool to built this into the set, but this idea haven't made it to the diorama though...

a bit more about the history of the street here
(source: http://gwulo.com/Pottinger-Street-Hong-Kong)


When it was last checked in the 1980's, it was considered to be at risk of collapsing, and so was filled in.  This tunnel, along with Hong Kong's other Air Raid Precaution Tunnels, was built around 1940-41, so it would have been finished some where very close to the street's 100th birthday. 
The single, sloping entrance to the tunnel was on the section of Pottinger St about midway between Stanley and Wellington Streets. From there the tunnel ran for appx 75m, straight back into the hill. Its only other claim to fame seems to be its ventilation system. It was one of two ARP tunnel networks in Hong Kong (the other was the the tunnel under the governor's residence) that used ducted ventilation. That would have been a necessity for this tunnel, as with only one entrance and no ventilation shaft, there was no other way to circulate fresh air.



and a little bit of blog admin.  Thanks to my entry on photography I got over 1,000 hits a day and a few more clicks on the ads.  and now that the blog traffic is a lot more healthy it gives me a lot more incentive to blog.

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