Diorama: The tower

This is a diorama project for Girls’ last tour.

This diorama is a bit unique for me because, for the first time, I won’t be using any of environmental setups.

In Girls’ last tour, there was a moment where the girls climbed an old tower. The tower looked old and it was falling apart. That scene is what I will try to replicate here.

This project starts with a small 5 by 7 inch wooden plating board as well as Girls’ last tour kettenkrad model kit I’ve completed a while ago.

The wooden board is stained soon after.

Now, here is where things get interesting. I’ve considered numerous materials to create a portion of a tower. A plastic sheet was considered. A metal sheet was considered. But nothing seemed to make my life easy.

While browsing Amazon for a metal sheet, I’ve come across something interesting.

Above is a brushed aluminum wall tile. That itself is not interesting. What’s interesting is that the tiles you can see up there can be separated easily. I found this out while reading reviews of the product.

Then everything clicked in my head.

What could have been a messy job turned out to be a piece of cake. Really, this project could have been a messy job.

If you fail to grasp what I am trying to do, simply keep looking below. I want a sci-fi style but dirty tower that has clearly seen better days.

The tiles have made my job extremely easy. Attempting to replicate that with a metal sheet or a plastic sheet could have been a really time consuming work, not to mention a risk of a total failure.

One of possibilities was an iron sheet with leather punching holes for bolts and a knife to draw lines, but I just couldn’t see it work properly.

This is after two short airbrushing takes. The first was black. The second was red brown. Not done yet.

This would have been a lot harder and would have taken much more time if it wasn’t for the aluminum tile. It made this so much easier and quicker.

Now, I specifically purchased a display case for this, so let’s assemble that as well.

You can find these on Amazon easily. The price isn’t that cheap though. The one above cost me 45 CAD. Gone are the days where you could find proper display cases. Well, you can still find them in hobby stores and what not.

What the fu –

Sigh …. You see, I purchased the display case based on the dimension of the base which is 5 by 7. I failed to foresee that the platform would add an additional requirement.

Knowing that the display case cost me 45 CAD and that returning is no longer possible, I chose a work-around for this by … chopping it off.

I can just brush over the spot.

Unless someone is specifically looking for the spot, I don’t think anyone will notice.

And here we are done and dusted.

In the end, this project was fun because I tried out something entirely new. This was the first time I’ve ever done any sci-fi related diorama. I’d love to do these sort of thing again but I need a subject to start with, and there aren’t many choices.

Until next time.