Goblin Halloween Diorama- Part 23- Photos- Field Project

Now that the house has been glued to the board, I can start adding details that will start to tell the story of the diorama.  I want to make this a spooky Halloween diorama.  So it becomes an issue of how to get across the idea of spooky.  I have to ask myself what makes things spooky and why do we think they are eerie?  What gives us a warning that causes our hair to stand on end and makes us feel that something is not quite right even when nothing is apparently wrong? 

Old abandoned houses are spooky in and of themselves.  We may not have any information on why someone abandoned a house, so we project our personal abandonment fears onto the situation.  That creates a fearful situation to begin with.  We also tend to view a house as having a story of the people who inhabited it.  When we don't know the story ended, we have a feeling of things left unfinished or prematurely ended.  This leaves us with an uncomfortable feeling as well.  Sometimes we do know the story, and if it is an ominous story with a bad ending, it scares us when we confront the unknown.  (For example:  Amityville Horror by Jay Anson.)  So an abandoned house by itself sets a tone.  It is time to build on those themes.  Read on.

Today the average city or suburban dweller does not generally give a lot of thought to birds except when birds leave a mess on their cars.  Birds are just some creatures that fly away when you move in their direction.   But we unconsciously carry a lot of symbolism and unconscious memory about birds.  It is always there, we just don't normally call that information to consciousness and think about it.  (I'd go into more detail here, but it may be too upsetting for some people, especially if he or she should  stumble upon it unexpectedly.)  Anyway, when we see a flock of large black birds, or for that matter a large flock of birds, it gives us an ominous feeling.  To add an ominous feeling to the diorama, it needed to have a lot of large black birds.  And that is when I ran into a arts and crafts product that was just what I needed.

My craft store had added a new product to its shelves.  This product is made by Modge Podge.  Basically, it was small silicone molds that could be used with their hot glue.  You used your hot glue gun to heat their product and pipe it into the molds.  The glue came in clear or white.  You squeezed the glue out of the glue gun into the mold.  When the glue was dried, it popped right out of the mold.  The pieces were very tiny, and held an incredible amount of detail.  No mold release was needed.   When the pieces came out of the mold I had to clean up the edges with a craft knife.  After that, they could be painted.  For the record, I purchased and experimented with Modge Podge sticks of glue first.  Afterwards, I tried it with some of my regular hot glue and it worked just as well as far as coming out of the mold, but it was not as clear as the Modge Podge product.

I saw a couple of different molds, but the one that interested me was the one that had birds in various poses.  These molds were very tiny.  The largest of the birds was only about three quarters of an inch to an inch across.  Other birds were smaller.  They were the perfect scale for my diorama.  The only unfortunate part of this was that the molds are for only one side of the birds; the back is flat.  I had to work on the other side to make it look like a three dimensional bird by building up the flat side with hot glue.  After a little practice, I was able to get things working well enough that I could make birds for the diorama.  So now I have started adding birds.  I don't want to add too many on the house, but there will be more in trees.

Because the product uses hot glue and a sharp craft knife, I'd say that it was best used by adults or teenagers under supervision.  However, your inner child will find a number of ways to use this product. 

Today's field project photo was taken at 9:00 am.  The temperature was 53 degrees (Fahrenheit).  Winds were calm.  The field seems to have a slight purplish cast to it in some spots.  The haze is actually tiny seed pods on the weeds.

Check back on Wednesday for the next step in the diorama.