Miniature Painting Diorama skills learned with Roman Lappat on his minipainting workshops

Dear readers,
I had the pleasure to visit a two day private Coaching with Roman and would like to give you a little insight into this great time and Romans talents not only as an artist but also as a human beeing.

But first let me give a brief introduction of myself.
My name is Oliver and I have visited my first class with Roman more than 5 years ago. Since then my life changed a lot. In my career I took over more and more responsibilities and at the same time I got married and now have a little daughter. As a consequence I had not held a brush for nearly two years. I booked this coaching in late spring and now was exactly the right time to enjoy it. I felt I was close to breaking down to the jobs stress, having been on the road more than 70 nights this year. But during this two days I got the chance to calm down and come back to inner peace.

For my project I had two ideas prepared.
The first one would have been fairly common with putting a great miniature into a dark forest with an intense light source on her. The other idea was a bit more special and I was very pleased that Roman agreed to guide me through the process in spite of the fact that he has never done or seen anything similar before.

In 2017 my wife and myself visited Sweden and we especially enjoyed our days in Visby on the island of Gotland. During this time I took a nice picture with an overview of parts of the town, contrasting the mideval structures, buildings from the 19th century as well as some 20th century houses.

This picture has been on my mind since this vacation. I wanted to convert it into something special, using lessons I learned at Romans classes and create something purely unique. My idea was to put into a modern relief by building the structures and physically place them in front of each other.

As a first stept Roman helped me getting into a planning phase. How can we create the feeling of three dimensions in a flatter environment. He showed me theory about focal points and how 90° angles appear into projections. With this idea in mind he asked me to create a scetch on paper to identify which are the important parts of the picture and which can be simplified. In the end I found 4 layers I wanted to bring into the picture.

Before the class I scouted my old materials and found a nice little box that had roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper. This was the perfect frame for the idea and determined the size of the creation.

The next step was to convert the scetch from paper to a first 3D image by using cork and cutting out the shapes of the buildings I wanted to use. This was followed by cutting the shapes out of thin wood in a more precise way to get a better painting base.

This is basically the level I had envisioned before we started working on that. But Roman had an idea to push me further. Why just paint the different angles if you have the freedom to build them up? And to emphasize the perspective even further use different levels of elevation for the different layers.

As a next step some help for the paint job later was applied. Windows and doors were glued onto the buildings and some putty was applied to create a rough surface was applied. For the building of the front layer also rain drains and roof tiles were added.

Now on the second day at roughly lunch time it was time to start applying color and bring life into the diorama. As usual I started with black and white priming

The following hours were used to apply more base colors and scetch the overall impression. As a final touch a lot of green flock was added to support the 3d feeling and cover up parts were I did not want to go into too much detail.

Some additional painting sessions at home followed were I enjoyed Romans quick support that comes with the coaching. As a last detail I added a little flag of Gotland and proudly present to you:

Visby

In a retrospective
I cannot describe how happy I am that I was able to get this coaching. 
I was in a very dark spot and Roman did not only find some good advice to let me think about what is currently going on but also had a perfect feeling how much guidance I needed. I was unsecure and often asked what he thinks and on many occasions he just replied "you don't need me, trust your gut". I am already looking forward to the next opportunity to spend time with Roman to create something special, be it a private coaching or a work shop."

- Oliver

Miniature Painting Diorama skills learned with Roman Lappat on his minipainting workshops