Building a Desert

Building a diorama to display your toys in idle scenes or in the midst of battle is both fun and the result can be awesome. Then again, dioramas can take up a lot of space and expensive on materials, so I never thought I'd do more than one. I've done three ... This time I thought I'd build a desert scene. What I had in mind? Just a desert. That's it. A boring dull desert with nothing much on it. Most of my dioramas so far have been fairly busy with lots of trees that take up most of the space, leaving little room to actually display my battle scenes. So the theme of this one is "open space". A desert's good for something like that. At least, that was the start of it. Space is still the theme, but some features need to be in it to make it look good. Many ideas crossed my mind since then. The first one was a simple hill with a mine shaft. Would be easy to make. Just a few sticks to make the door frame and build a hill around it and bam! Instant terrain feature. But that was boring. The idea progressed to having the ends of a space ship sticking out of the ground. My thought process here rather surpised me. I looked at the caps of some old permanent markers. They looked like they could make bell burners for a rocket. At the scale I was working at, three of them screwed to a base would be perfect! All it needed then was to be boxed in to make the space ship fuselage. The idea was to have the end of an old crashed space ship sticking out of the ground - or a hill. Lots of other ideas sprang to mind after this, like blocks sticking out of the side housing gun turrets, or the side lying slightly open - indicating that this was a large transport ship. All sorts. So after spending so much time on the basic idea, I got to work on the core of the diorama - the terrain shell. Using a square board as a base, I taped scrunched up wads of newspaper with masking tape into the rough shape of the terrain I had in mind. In this case, a hill to one side and just slightly lumpy but otherwise mostly flat land on the other side. I have to thank the Woodland Scenics handbook for the basics on terrain building. (It's a very informative manual designed specifically to sell their products - luckily similar substitutes will do) Using a roll of plaster cloth, I created the plaster shell for the terrain by wetting and then overlapping squares of the plaster cloth down. This bit is really messy and I got to get my hands really covered in plaster by the end of it! I unfortunately accidentally deleted the mid-way pictures of the completed shell at this point. Now that I've started the build, things have changed yet again. I've now got this idea for a rather run down looking base of sorts. It started when I was cutting a sheet of styrene to make the base for the rocket burners. I etched the lines in that I wanted. Somehow it turned into a door. I coated it in metallic paint. First in stainless steel, then in aluminum. Then I burnished the paint job (as per the instructions) and it almost became a mirrored surface! It looked almost frosty. I coated it in clear gloss then applied rub-on lettering an called it "Ice Berg 13" (the numbers were from a spare Gundam Seed HCM Pro slide-on decal sheet I had lying around). Actually it was meant to be Ice Berg 09, but I damaged the slide-on letters beyond repair at that point. Now it was a door! Why Ice Berg? I thought it would be funny to have a base in the desert called Ice Berg. I put the door in place and then used modeling clay to create an extension to the hill and fix the door in place. Because the whole terrain was still damp, it shrank as it dried and left cracks in the clay. This was unintentional, but it had the benefit of looking like natural wear and erosion. I rubbed some clay into the flat terrain to make the ground a bit rougher. As I was working, another idea sprang to mind. Soda caps can make reasonable water tanks! I gathered a few and set them aside for later. The next step was to paint the terrain. Normally I dab the terrain with a brush to give it that natural uneven colour, but this time I took a different approach. I airbrushed the whole thing. Thanks to the shape of the terrain, everything turned out really well. It does look a bit redder in these photos. Almost like a Martian landscape. I might mist a coat of white mixed with desert yellow onto the terrain to lighten it a bit. While painting, I didn't mask the door. This resulted in paint being feathered onto it along the edges. This weathered it and made it look dusty. Just the effect I was after, but I lost the mostly frosty mirror look of the door. I then painted the soda bottle caps in aluminum and weathered them a little with brown. Not sure if I want to have them set out side by side or whether to stack them on top of the other to make a tall water tank. I've not attached them to the shell as of yet. When I do, a clay base will be made, they'll be superglued into place and then the clay painted. That's as far as I've reached so far. I'd like to add more features to the hill to make it look like a real structure of some sort. Chimneys, pipes (to the tanks), some windows or building projecting from the side of the hill or maybe even a windmill. Then again it could just be some eccentric's refrigerator or garage. I don't think I can mimic rusty corrugated iron, but that's the image I have in mind with this facility. What next for this diorama? Who knows - I haven't really planned that far ahead. As my goal to have a large plain area has been achieved, the fate of the rest of the diorama is all in the air. I can easily have robots standing pretty, on guard or having a fist fight in the sand. Or any other machines for that matter. The base itself is really just a backdrop. A point of interest in the background that can add colour to the scene, but is not necessarily involved. And what of the rocket ship I had in mind? Well, it'll be kept as an idea for a potential future project. Stay tuned for the completion - when I get round to it.