Homemade Diorama
If you want to make a diorama, there are countless ways to go about it. Consider your expectations about the final product, why you are making it, and where, how and why it will be displayed. The more you expect from it, the more work it will require. However, building a diorama is mostly about understanding the principles of framing, background, stage and foreground. A diorama is ultimately a presentation of a subject caught in a moment, so a sense of action or direction is important as well.
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Things You'll Need
- Shoe box or wooden base
- Foam insulation or Styrofoam sheets
- Plaster bandages or model plaster strips
- Ground foam
- Small sieve
- White glue
- Diorama objects (models, toys, figures, buildings, trees, etc.)
- Flat black acrylic paint
- Flat green, gray or brown acrylic paint
- Paint brushes
- Ground foam and/or model railroad ballast
Instructions
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Choose a suitable framing structure for the diorama to fit your display area. This can be a box or a wooden display board, or two pieces of wood joined in a 90-degree angle or even a picture frame laid out horizontally.
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Choose one section of the structure to be the background, one to be the center stage and one to be the foreground. The stage will occupy the most space. The background will be the highest point of the diorama when a viewer is facing it and should be no more than one-third of the total space of the diorama. The center stage will occupy the most area. The foreground will be where you place the smallest details, effectively creating three layers of visual interest.
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Cut a piece of foam insulation or foam packing. Attach it to the base using white glue. You can cut additional sections to add dimensions and topography.
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Apply plaster bandages over the foam to smooth out edges.
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Paint a layer of brown, green and/or gray on the plaster when it is done and sprinkle ground foam or stone ballast, available in most hobby stores, over top of it using a small sieve to simulate environmental base details.
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Decorate the background. It may be covered with a photograph, a painted background, model building facades or simply a higher landscape elevation relative to the foreground. If it is in a box or has an upright background, make sure all parts are covered. However, if you are building on a flat frame, a bank of tall trees might be a good background for a dinosaur diorama or battered buildings for a World War II diorama.
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Decorate the stage area using white glue to hold the subjects in place. This will contain your main subjects. For example, in a World War II tank diorama, this is where the tanks go.
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Decorate the foreground. This is where small details and perhaps smaller figures go. Again, use white glue to hold them in place.
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Paint all areas of the diorama base or frame that are remaining black to clarify visually that these are not part of the scene.
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Tips & Warnings
These are just basic principles. If you are creating a school diorama, this may be all you need. However, if you are looking for more complex scenes, you should take a look at sites devoted to military dioramas (see Resources) or railroad modeling (see Resources) for ideas and tips.
Hobby stores have a wide variety of supplemental products and preformed diorama bases.
Resources
- Photo Credit at the museum image by Eric Isselée from Fotolia.com
