[by Jean Diorama]

Complete Dioramas list from Distant Shores

Seashore

Resin and supersculpey

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Alps

Resin, Supersculpey and flowers

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Baskunchak

Baskunchak is a salt lake not very far from Ukraine.. The colours took me several weeks to fine tune.

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Tropics

Here’s a diorama I intended as being a cliché of everything nice and summer related, a holidays feel. the scale is more reduced than usual. I don’t know whetehr 1/48 or 1/72 would be best to qualify it.

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Scotland, 1/35 box diorama

I absolutely don’t know whether there are such paths leading to the sea in Scotland. I based that diorama on a picture I found on Instagram but couldn’t remind where it was shot. I’m particularly happy about the colouring despite the subdued feel of that scene. Finally I absolutely love to add herons in my

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Baltic

When the summer comes, I start again creating water related dioramas because the epoxy resin dries better. Here’s another Northem Sea diorama complete with driftwood and a bit of dark sea. Payne Gray rules!

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Northern Seas

Some Northern sea is did last October. The biggest seascape I ever did yet. Inspired by pictures taken on the Lofoten islands, near Norway.

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Frigate

That’s a very simple scene with a frigate bird and a light blue sea. I love doing such dioramas in the summer, before going to holidays.

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The Swimming Pool

That one is based on the picture of a woman bathing in ice.. a good pretext to model ice and to play with colours

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Sweden

1/35 Northern sea diorama based in Sweden, complete with little boats and another Heron! The little brother of Kamtchatka diorama

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Tropics

The first of the tropics series. the idea is experimenting again with colour depth, epoxy resin sculpting and waves painting. Summer jobs..

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Scotland

The first of the Scotland dioramas I did, the second one was created one year later. One of my best seascapes so far compleet with lighting effects and rocky seashore yet again.

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Kamtchatka

The little brother of the Sweden diorama. Different lattitudes and rocky shore and a nice blue sea.

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Seagull

Another one of my best seascapes because it’s simple and has a seagull. My epoxy resin work at its best.

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Mairangi Bay 2

There are lots of places in my mind where the land is bare and only populated by knee jerk reactions. Then some UFO of a news comes over. I discuss it with the Sandy Haired Girl and when she leaves, there are roads, libraries and pubs all over the place. I feel blessed knowing her

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Dark Sea

When I was working on references to model my set of  windows last year , I came across that legion of Russian Instagramers who document endlessly crumbling wooden huts and churches, icy buildings up north. Checking month after month I realized that if you lend me their good drones and the means to travel at

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Window #4

This one was inspired both by a building not very far from my home and a picture I saw which was taken in Minsk – Belarus which showed such a building full of snow, the aim was to reproduce those snowy effects.

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Mairangi Bay

I used to have a friend living in Auckland New Zealand, she was living near mairangi Bay and kept on sending me beautiful pictures of the volcanic sand and the blue sea. For some reason i found it very hard to reproduce the exacts hues of that sea. Up to this day I don’t really

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Воркута Vorkuta

Every winter, countless of Russian bloggers seem to converge to t(hat special town called Vorkuta which is quite close to the polar circle. Lots of abandoned buildings with icicles coming out of the windows. Some buildings litteraly seem to be encrusted with ice, it’s really beautiful. As an add-on, I placed a bottle of Jagermeister

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The Whale

I used to feel pretty vacant. That is, not depressed or anything, just empty. Nothing positive or negative goes on in my mind, just a blind wish to keep on sculpting and painting without real aim or anything. Through that foggy mind of mine, I feel echoes of people that I miss and old situations

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Auckland

Most people I know are naturally more or less connected with their birth place. Most of the time it feels like no more than a tiny wire, it takes form of special feeding tastes, a slight accent or foods, the feeling like we have a Heimat at a very special place. But for some, this

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ÅTRÅ

I think it dates from last summer when the barges on the Rhône were opened late at night and found out that the only music that would help me getting back home after some heavy Friday night evenings week spent with friends was the music of Danish band Dannheim. There was something about the heroic

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The crow

When I was a kid, my parents had some friends living in Göttingen so we went to visit so I could improve my German. One fine summer afternoon we visited the Harz mountains and the blueberries were extraordinary. I was stepping on sundews, came across a tiny Russian cemetery under the trees with « unbekannt » written

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Bluebird

It took me a long time to realize that I tend to not get on that well with people of my own age. It’s just like i have the feeling that for some, getting older is a long process of closing oneself to the outside world and getting used to gradually live inwards. I used

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Disapperaring in Aiguebelette

« When I feel like it, I leave late at night and disappear. I never go back home till late the following day. I invent a new name, go to new places. With time this other disappearing Me got some friends on her own, like a perfect double life. My boyfriend hates it, he accepts it

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Brasil

I used to have a friend from that place. He used to have jeweled hands and wrists and fair hair. But his eyes were for me a complete mystery because they were totally black and Ijust couldn’t exactly see what was beneath those. Since then I have that image of that country where I shall

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Dollhouse

Whenever I feel like I really went too much beyond my own universe, i feel like I have to go back to my basis. That is Mother Russia, the Heimat of my dioramas. It must be because Tarkovski is my preferred filmmaker or that I spend my time listening to Russian ambient music and hip

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Zig et Sharko

Like a lot of parents i am leading a constant war against the amount of time my kids spend in front of the TV. But of course i tend to look at their cartoons above their shoulders. Among those there is Zig & Sharko, which is a sort of Wile and roadrunner for kids born

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Up

Does she go upwards or does she crashes facedown on the sand like a pancake?..

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Dobermann

So that’s the story of a friend of mine who was more or less living with an older girl who owned a big black smelly scruffy noisy unsound bastard of a dog she had got at the RSPCA. It was phenomenally badly trained and was generally speaking scaring the shit out of him. Then after

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Just the Sea

Lots of people seemed to have liked that BMW diorama while it was a rather painful buisness from start to finish. So whenever I work on a hard project i need to relax afterwards which is the reason why i choose to do a rather relaxing work: yet another sea scape.

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E-21

It took me more than 6 weeks to complete that dog. I can’t believe it for such a small scene. The kit is Meng’s BMW E-21 in 1/35, it’s reasonably good. I still wonder what made me think of this idea, perhaps a bit of influence from Simon Stalenhag, perhaps also the fact I, being

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Wavebreaker

That one is completely based on a picture a friend sent me on a forum, so much for my creativity. The only difference was that there was a woman sleeping over one of the cubic wavebreakers. I removed something that I would have considered as a cliché on one of my dioramas, putting the emphasis

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Visited Place #1

Visited place. That diorama changed a bit since I first planned it, but the point was also to use those great Model Scene ferns in a more artistic fashion than what i see here and there. Hope you like the texture and colouring.  

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Pollen (Medusa V)

That’s  my own version of Millais’ Ophelia. I always planned to use that portrait I sculpted a few years back in one way or another and then last spring I saw pollen gently drifing on a lake, and here we go.. That pollen shape was probably my greatest moment in modeling that year so far.

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Medusa VII

This diorama is an echo of Medusa 1  to 3 that you can see on the JbaDiorama website. It’s part of an ongoing fictionnal story about trouble waters. The orange cat that was on Medusa 3 is now resting on trimmed pine trunks, I kept the garish colours of the 2 and nobody is throwing up anymore

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Black Ice

It all started when a friend of mine told « I want to go to Iceland because the sand on the beaches is BLACK ». So in my mind I started playing with a game of contrasts, the white of the ice, the blue of the stranded Ice.. you guys should follow me on Instagram because i

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The Law of Diminishing Returns

« In economics, diminishing returns is the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant » states Wikipedia. In other words, If i keep on doing seascapes over and over, people will

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On the rocks

I sort of want to follow the seasons with my dioramas, so after that new one in 4 months i thought i could do something about the scorching heat of those past few days. Hence this diorama which makes me want to dive, but not too close from the Rocks.  

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Yttygran

Yttygran is an island situated in the Bering sea. Says Wikipedia :  « Situated on the northern shore of Yttygran island (from the Chukchi Etgyran, meaning « midway dwellings »), whale bone alley consists of a large number of carefully arranged whale skulls, whale bones and stones, along with a considerable number of meat storage pits »  

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Just the Sea 1 #1

The second prototype! Long gone now, looks like blue flowers..

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Ripples

I always have the temptation of going a bit beyond those nature dioramas by including some human input at some point and then I say to myself heck no.. Not yet. Let’s finish first at least 20 of those and then we’ll see. And every time this temptation occurs I feel the need of doing

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The Grey Sea

The Grey sea is my best of the series so far. It has it all. First it’s done at a smaller scale than the usual 1/35 and then it’s simple and falls together. The epitome of my technique of quite simply letting my hand thinking for myself. Thanks for watching. I will probably be doing

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The Icy River

Another one I have mixed feelings about. In truth this is a sort of draft : I have a truck model that waits for me since about 2 years now. The plan was to put it near a icy torrent like that one. But then I was unsure of the icy effects and about how

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Brook in autumn

Dreary humid, foggy autumn and then the yellow leaves fall in the river filled with pure water as renewed by the countless scattered showers. I feel both cold and happy when looking at that one.

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Top of the Lake

One of the lesser of the series I suppose? I should work on it again. The colors are good and make it for a rather uneventful water scape. Something has to be done! Watch this space!

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Aivazovsky

Aivazovski is not the best painter in history but I think he was my work’s major influence at some point. I like it all, the colors, the shape, the movement, the historical frame,  the drama. Here is a typical diorama inspired by his work. I still have a lot of work to reach the level of

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Muddy shore

So it happens my mom lives close to the Bassin d’Arcachon which is located on Western France. When the tide is low the sea almost leaves the whole place and you can see a limitless area of ooze. It can be quite dangerous too: when you walk too far in, the mud sucks your leg

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White shore

« Yeah it’s rather nice, the primary lines are good, but you missed the secondary ones ». The art teacher leaves the room, I suddenly feel slightly depressed.. The sea in winter. Lots of fog a white atmosphere you can’t see much not a lot of colors. I walk on the beach in Aquitaine, some white pine

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Winter Marsh

Ever since I am a small kid I have been fascinated by marshes, ponds you name it. I remember when I was a kid going in full winter near a small lake which had been emptied and the guys were picking up the fishes like they would have gather apples.. The whole place was shrouded

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Just the Sea 1 #2

I gave out the first of that series to someone who is very dear to me and I was suddenly deprived of my first diorama, the only one with true saturated colors I did so far. As I still had the form I used for it (silicon one, reusable), I decided to do a new

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