Painting a Diorama Background

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to start with a painted background. First lay out your paints. I'm using acrylic paints today, but you can also use tempura paint or a gouache. Water color will not work for this, you need an opaque paint that's going to really cover the back of the box. I'm laying out colors that I know that are going to be in my background. I'm going to make a sky, I'm going to make some mountains, and I'm going to make just some green blobs that will represent trees. Remember, this is a background, so everything is far off in the distance, it doesn't have to be exactly looking like a perfect tree. First I'm going to lay in my sky. I'm going to take some blue paint and I'm just going to be doing the back of the box first. I'm going to lay in my blue paint here. If it's not the exact color you want, you can always paint over it. But, it's a bright sunny day so this blue is perfect. Decide how far your sky is going to be. Now I want to add in some mountains. I'm going to rinse my brush and take some brown, and I like this color brown right out of the tube, and I'm going to just lay in. You might want to let the blue dry a little bit. But it's Okay to have a little bit of the blue reflected on the mountains. You don't have to make them even. I'm going to add a little black to my brown. Because maybe these are a farther away. I'm going to add a little more brown there and then I'm going to phase it down into green, because there's a grassy low land. You can make your backgrounds as complicated or as simple as you like. Think about what you're diorama's about. If you're doing a scene with soldiers coming into a town, you're going to need to paint a town in there. Or, if you?re doing an aviation scene with two fighter planes fighting in the sky, you're just going to do a blue background with, maybe, some puffy white clouds. But, here, we're just going to do a simple pastoral scene. Just make sure you get everything covered in the background. And there you have it. There's your painted background."