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A garden is the calm that gives a scene tension

The strongest military dioramas tend to be those where something ordinary meets something exceptional. A table with chairs in a garden is exactly that ordinary element: dull in itself, but set beside a parked vehicle or beneath a damaged facade it starts to work. The set is a wooden sheet cut by laser, so the shape of the parts is done and the texture of the material is fine.

Where to build such a corner

A yard behind a house, the terrace of an inn, a garden taken over for a crew to rest in or the space under a tree by a field track all suggest themselves. An abandoned version also works well: an overturned chair, the table pushed against the wall, a vessel forgotten on the top. Garden seating also gives a scene scale, because every viewer knows its size by heart and immediately measures the rest of the scene against it.

Working with wood

• break the parts out with something under the sheet; thin parts snap easily
• sand the surface lightly along the grain before painting
• a thin glaze preserves the texture better than a covering coat
• either leave the scorched edges from the cut as a shadow, or sand them flat

Varnishing the wood to a high gloss or laying on a thick coat of paint is not recommended. That is exactly what destroys the reason a wooden sheet is used in the first place, namely the texture of the surface.

It is also worth considering which way you turn the seating. A chair pushed back from the table and turned outwards suggests somebody has just got up from it, whereas one pushed up against the top looks as though nobody ever sat there.