At the right you’ll find a digital painting by your PopCulteer of master dioramist, Mike Gardner. Welcome to part two of our photo essay devoted to his most recent work.
First off, apologies for the lag time between parts one and two of this photo essay. Last year the powers that be upgraded the blogging template and software here at the Gazette-Mail, and while it made a lot of improvements, most notably allowing us a much bigger space for our images, it also came with a few glitches, among them new difficulties captioning photos and running photo essays with much more than a dozen images. Those bugs are stubborn and have been evasive enough to keep from being worked out so far.
Meanwhile, I can pull a few acts of virtual sleight-of-hand to try and trick the blogging software into doing what I want. It’s a bit time-consuming and takes some Voodoo-like digital coaxing to make these things work, so it’s been until now that I could get the second of our photo essays devoted to Mike Gardner’s awesome Avengers Assemble diorama at ToyLanta posted. You can read part one HERE. Part three will be up sooner because the photos in it are not going to require as many captions.
In this batch of photos we see more Mike’s progress building the diorama. You may notice a gap in our coverage. Mike worked through the night on this project, and as mere mortals, we had to excuse ourselves so we could get some sleep. So we missed a lot of Mike’s work. It’s fully evident in the photos of the assembled diorama, which you will see soon.
Here are more photos of the construction of Avengers Assemble, Mike Gardner’s massive diorama at toylanta 2017.
Mike, judging the placement of the crashed helicopter on the set.
Beginning the centerpiece of destruction.
Adding more figures, and with some rubble in place.
A repurposed zombie from the Walking Dead diorama, wearing a Radio Cult t-shirt.
Much further along, with Iron Man flying by.
A closer look at Iron Man in the finished diorama.
A better look at the nearly-complete diorama with the helicoptor fully in place.
More Hot Toys Marvel figures have joined the fray.
A lower angle that shows more of the scene. Mike resisted my suggestions that the fiddler be placed on the roof.
On the other side of the diorama, before more people have been added, you sort of get the feeling that the guy on the bench is just really into his sandwich.
Another close-up to show the detail. Iron Man’s contrails were made by wrapping cotton batting around clear plastic rods. Very effective and cleverly done.
The finished diorama. You’ll see more photos of this in our next photo essay, hopefully in a day or so.
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