Creating dioramas of urban environments requires some painstaking patience and not to mention a steady hand!

Artist Alan Wolfson was blessed with such necessary skills to become one of America’s leading diorama creators, with dexterity, creativity and a bundle of patience being seemingly etched on his soul.

The artist has been creating dioramas of urban landscapes for more than 20 years, and has accrued an uncannily realistic selection of miniature streets, bars, hotels and many other significant cityscape components.

Being born and bred in New York, most of Alan Wolfson’s miniature sculptures are dedicated to a certain aspect or feature of his hometown. Although it is Wolfson’s latest creation, the Canal Street Cross-Section diorama, which is really causing pulses to race within the art world at present.

Comprising of a street scene, upper subway and lower subway, the Canal Street Cross-Section mini urban sculpture took the artist 18 months to complete.

Since the 1970s, virtual reality has been a powerful component in shaping society’s social and artistic environment and constructing small-scale hand-built depictions of real-life environments has been at the heart of this prevailing artistic trend.

Throughout the past 12 months, miniaturist Gregory Euclide has been working on a series of organic dioramas, depicting natural landscapes on vertical canvases.

Environmental-consciousness is, as it is in life itself, rapidly gathering poignancy in the art world, and Euclide’s miniature recreations of natural scenes, such as forests, rocky landscapes, streams and fields of flowers, figuratively manipulating nature on a miniature scale, designed to expose the extent of the harm we are causing to our planet, are certainly causing a stir.

From cityscapes to environmentally-conscious natural landscapes, dioramas are the perfect way to show and express practically any real-life aspect of our planet.

Although the art of miniature sculptures has been around for many, many centuries, there are little signs that this expressive form of art, which requires extraordinary patience and attention to detail, is abating.

On the contrary, dioramas seem to be escalating in popularity and prestige.