Life in Miniature: Tabletop creations depict life on Earth and fantasy worlds

Model builder Willy Clonts created this tiny world from found materials ranging from wooden coffee stirrers to cigar bands. He painted the glassy surface of the mini-river with white caps and varied blues to resemble waves and water.
Model builder Willy Clonts created this tiny world from found materials ranging from wooden coffee stirrers to cigar bands. He painted the glassy surface of the mini-river with white caps and varied blues to resemble waves and water.

Upcoming Events

› Chattanooga Miniature Modelers will display their work at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum’s Railfest Sept. 10-11 at 4111 Cromwell Road. They also will host an exhibit of their miniature landscapes and cities at the Hamilton County Fair Sept. 24-25 at Chester Frost Park in Hixson.› For more info go to www.chatmodmod.org or email chatmodmod@gmail.com.

The fishing camp looks like a charming part of someone's dreams.

The frame house has wooden shingles, hardwood floors made from carefully-cut coffee swizzle sticks. The moss flecked, golden-brown shingles were cut from cigar bands. Visitors enjoy the shade of a deep porch near handmade lobster baskets stacked neatly on one corner of the dock while a boy in a straw hat casts a line into the water. Two men playing checkers are a fraction of an inch tall.

The camp itself is tiny enough to hold in one hand. And it was all built by Willy Clonts, a "scratch builder," the honorary title given by model city builders to someone so talented, he can create whole worlds from materials he scavenges, carves or makes himself.

"I also made the smaller boat for that harbor," Clonts says, nodding toward a jaunty powerboat on a dark-green, hard-plastic ocean harbor that three men are placing on a large table. "Each of us here is really good at different things, so we can make some really great towns and cities together."

Clonts and the others are members of Chattanooga Modular Modelers, a nonprofit that wants to build a local museum of miniature metropolises and landscapes. For now, they display their works at festivals, schools, the Creative Discovery Museum and various events. Each month, they meet in a two-room house donated by a member as club space. They bring their works-in-progress for critiques and fine tuning, brainstorm new landscapes like the harbor city and work on projects while giving each other advice and feedback.

Some of the model makers build miniature versions of real-life cities like Boston, Nashville, Chattanooga or use historic photos to duplicate a street from a city's past. Most club members are also model train enthusiasts who began making miniature cities and scenery as backdrops for the trains which, collector Gary Catlett, Jr. explains, vary dramatically according to the era they represent, which run from 19th-century steam locomotives to post-World War II diesel engines.

But Modular Modelers Vice President Pat Turner notes that some people create landscapes that are complete fantasy such as trains on the moon, or they use bits and pieces from quest games like Warhammer. Yes, somewhere at this moment, a model train is rolling past scenery peopled with wee Beastmen, Pink Horrors, Brimstone Horrors Grot Scuttlings and a Mistweaver Saith.

"Most of us recreate from historical photos and data we collect or from memories we gained during childhood," Modelers President Mark McAllister explains. "We view and review many times during the building process in order to attain the level of realism we desire. I guess you could also say we model history as well. Others prefer to take a whimsical approach to modeling and that's OK, too.

"I've been involved in this hobby for 40 years," McAllister adds. "It has also increased my appreciation for history, the arts, technology development just by being involved."

In Clonts' model, it takes three men to maneuver the growing number of harbor city pieces onto a large table so they can look it over and see how it flows; the harbor is one piece and Sandy Dittus brought cookies to fuel the heavy lifting. There also are smaller pieces that depict a portion of downtown, a distant cemetery and a remote forest where teeny steel drums disgorge a neon-green goo all over the grass - a hazmat spill. A tiny crew of first responders is still being created.

The landscapes are modular. The Modelers plan what individual pieces need to be built, then fit them together like puzzle pieces. Much of the downtown in Clonts' harbor city is built from kits, but a lot of the rural and industrial area outside the city is by scratch builders.

"We have some really good scratch builders like Willy and most of our female club members," member Bill Dittus says.

Joanna Long, a sign language instructor at Chattanooga State Community College, is one of those gifted scratch builders. She sits at a table in the adjacent room, constructing a greenhouse for a nursery that will be part of the harbor city. She has already fashioned a livestock car for a minuscule train, using slivers of wood as slender as toothpicks. She then turned to a photo of Dayton, Tenn.'s Custom Landscape and Design greenhouses for inspiration. Her attention to detail is extraordinary.

Each table inside the greenhouse is no more than a half inch long. but she carefully cuts a bit of dark-green foam to glue onto the table so it will resemble leaves when hulking human onlookers stare down at the miniature. Then she will sprinkle each green-topped table with specks of ruby, white and periwinkle foam to make it look as if the tables are covered with blooming flowers.

She actually finds the hobby restful and says it's also tapping a creative skill she never knew she had until a beloved relative died and left behind model train magazines with how-to scenery construction tips.

"When we build a landscape or a scene, each of us knows how much space our module will have and often they have a storyline," Long says. "Just like gamers, we hide Easter eggs, these fun little treats for the eye that the onlookers have to look for carefully in order to search them out and find them."

This summer at the Creative Discovery Museum Folk Life Festival, the modelers set up a big riverside wilderness park scene loaded with Easter eggs to thrill the children who visited it. For example, a toy train rolled past a couple of bears headed toward a cluster of RVs each about two inches long. Kayakers, swimmers and guys in innertubes smaller than a dime floated past a mermaid drying her buttercup-hued hair in the sun as she lounged on a rock.

Several members good-naturedly observed that the mermaid is not welcome in all venues. At least a couple of times a viewer complained a mermaid is a pagan symbol who might provoke devilish thoughts.

Trains are always a part of every miniature landscape's storyline here. Dittus and fellow modelers John Watson and James Long labor diligently over the tracks. Fun-sized mini-boxes of Milk Duds serve as cargo until the club decides what the trains should carry.

The club's mission statement says a key goal is "encouraging artistic expression in a 3D, operational environment." Anyone who enjoys the magic of recreating a 3D scaled-down version of a real or imagined world should be engaged by the art of scratch building and scene design, the modelers say.

"Everyone is welcome, not just people who like model trains," member Vincent Carson says.

Contact Lynda Edwards at 423-757-6391 or ledwards @timesfreepress.com.

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