1:35 Kaplička

A small building by the road

A wayside shrine belongs to what stood in the European landscape before any war swept across it, and stood there afterwards as well. That is exactly why it is so strong on a diorama: it gives a scene a place and a time without needing a single inscription for it. The package holds one plaster casting and with it one resin part.

What the real subject looked like

The most common type was a small masonry structure with a niche, a tiled roof and a recess for a statuette or a picture, plastered smooth and whitewashed regularly. They were built at crossroads, on the edges of fields and above springs, often out of gratitude or in memory of some event. In time the plaster fell away, moss held on the north side and damp licked at the bottom, so even a new structure lost its untouched look within a few years.

Painting and surface

Plaster makes it possible to render fallen plaster literally: the surface is lightly scraped with a point and the exposed area repainted as brick. A whitewashed wall is never pure white; a noticeably warmer tone looks more convincing. Damp at the foot is suggested with a darker band sprayed from below, and moss with rubbed-in pigment or sifted static material.

A note on the build

The plaster and the resin part have different absorbency. Apply the primer to each material separately, therefore, otherwise the same color will come out differently on each of them.

Placement in a scene

The little structure belongs at the edge, not in the middle. At a crossroads, by the wall of an enclosure or among trees it looks natural, because that is exactly where people really built them, and passing vehicles then merely go by rather than give way to it.