It wouldn't hurt a bit if the kit manufacturers would follow Monogram's example from the 70's and hire someone to create a diorama for each of the more popular kits they market and include the "How-tos" along with a bill of materials in the kit (I'd do it free if they'd supplied the kits![Wink [;)]](/emoticons/icon_smile_wink.gif)
). Shep Paine's work for Monogram is what got me started in the diorama business, and I never saw a model the same way again... Looking at a well-built shelf-dweller is only mildly interesting to me, and at shows, it's not my favorite thing to do... I head for the dioramas and spend way more time looking those over than anything else.. Perhaps if FSM would run, every year, an "All-Diorama Jumbo Issue!" there'd be some more interest among the shelf-people...
I did notice that there's the "Space-issue" with some of y'all... I've never run into that problem m'self, since I don't keep dios forever... I eventually get sick of looking at and cleaning them, so they get torn down and go into the junk & spares boxes... Now that I've got a decent digital camera, they probably won't last as long as they did before, either... Some may last only a matter of weeks even... I may give some away if there's an interest in them though... Others may get face-lifts, like the Tiger crashing through the building wall may, in a year or so, be changed to a Sherman in the same spot with the crew wrestling with a thrown track... (My current gig with urban dios that involve some combat scenes is to build say, a German Brummbar engaging a target down the street, then the next dio would be an American unit being engaged by the same Brummbar and reacting to it)
Also, most of my single-vehicle/single-structure 1/35th armor can be fitted into 8 x 10 photo-frames, with a smattering of 11 x 14 works... The heavy bombers are the real space-hogs, needing a minumum of 24 x24 inches for the 1/48th B-17... 24 X 28 is better... The B-29 will need even more, about 28 X 34, but that's still workable, since it's getting it's own wall-mount. The largest on I'm building is going on a 16 X 8 base, but it's a commision-build and I'm doing that one on-site, thankfully... Otherwise, I'd have had to build in a modular system... However, I digress..
I think one thing I can start doing is to post more of my stuff in the aircraft/armor hoochs initially, then steer it over the Diorama hooch for final assembly... I'm doing that with my M12 SPH build, as a matter of fact, and will do so with the Wirblewind/Spitfire/Blitz piece... I can justify it because they get to the 75-85% completed stage in the respective hooch, but I can't finish a model to 100% until after it's permanently attached to the dio-base... This way of posting my work may influence some of the less-adventurous "shelfers" to stray outside their comfortable aircraft or armor hooches and into here, and maybe a small percentage of those will find themselves overtaken by the "Dark Side of the Dark Side", heh...
Moving on, still others find the figure-painting aspect of diorama-building their balliwick... It certainly was mine, at first, until I learned (even invented) a few simple tricks and short-cuts for figure painting/modification... There's also a way to build a stunning diorama that reqires no figures whatsoever, although it's somewhat limiting... For example, Shep Paine's "Lady Be Good" and his B-25J awaitng the scrapper's torch in the Arizona Desert after the war were two excellent works with no figures in sight (except for the lone rattlesnake taking in the shade under the bomber's wing) in the B-25 dio... The absence of figures added a very effective "Desolation and Loneliness" factor that figures would have ruined...
And then there's the time-factor... Myself, I can devote 8-10 hours a day to modeling 40-50 hours a week, and my output is still small (I've only been back in "business" since June of 08 also)... I treat each portion of a dio as a separate kit though, so when you consider the make-up of a typical "Hammer-dio", like the afore-mentioned Tiger (t's actually a Brummbar, that's not important right now), there are in reality, three (four, if you count the figures as one additional "kit") models making up the diorama: The Tank, the Street, and the Building. If you're doing urban with a tree, the tree itself is yet another model to build, so when all is said and done, I've built four models to make one diorama (figures make the fourth)...
Then there are the dios in the dios... Again, using the Brummbar example, the track is one scene, and on the second floor of the building is the command post for the Infanterie Kompanie being supported by the Brummbar. It's just three guys, the Funker, the Stabsfedwebel, and the Kommandant, a radio, table & chairs, and a couple sitmaps, but it's in there and it's a separate scene... So if you assign an average time of 10 hours per "model", there's 40 hours-worth of work in there... Break that up by the job-working, family-having, chore-doing average modeler's bench-time, and we're talking about 3 months from start to finish, provided that's the only thing he's building...
So... Overall, there's a lot of things going on in a diorama, and some of those things are not genre-specific... Buildings, terrain, and foliage are separate genres for most folks... The diorama builder has more in common with the model railroader than the model builder... Many modelers consider the railroad an entirely differnt hobby genre with no thoughts crossing over...
Just some random thoughts, gents... I needed a break from the shoot-down dio... I spent the night with a Russian Spitfire (and it wasn't a hot-tempered stripper named Svetlana)...