In the tiny world, there are several forms of miniature crafting, but when you visit my site, you might not have thought about miniature dioramas and how to make a diorama.
Although you might think otherwise, dioramas are still used in the animation world, but also for CD covers, for example.
Yes, yes, not everything is just about computers these days, the craft is still alive! 🙂
Anyway, I bought another interesting online course for you, so that I could dive deeper into the topic of how to make a miniature diorama for my new blog post. Let’s go!
This post contains Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API and Domestika
But First: What Is A Miniature Diorama?
A diorama is often a museum-worthy, 3D arrangement in which an existing or imaginative reality is shown.
The word diorama is used in a variety of forms: from miniature battlefield simulations to large-scale habitat simulations in Natural History Museums, etc..
But also dioramas are used to add to doll houses, like for example in the gardens of our little houses, to make little beach sceneries or even rivers.
Which Materials Do You Need to make a miniature diorama?
Here’s a list of the materials that you need to make a diorama, some of them are essential but a few of them are not or could become expensive.
It is totally up to you to purchase what you need or what you think you will use.
Paint: mostly acrylic paint, there’s a lot of choice in brands. You can use these to paint on wood, paper, and other surfaces.
To paint on plastic, however, a polyurethane type of paint is more advisable.
Woodwork dye, it’s supposed to dye any kind of wood and even paper. Which can be interesting to mimic any kind of wood, for example, walnut or sapeli, or other hardwood.
Watercolor liquid, preferably from Ecoline. This product makes it easy to give your miniature pieces an aged look and can serve as a transparent glaze.
metallic paint ( golden color), aka modeling paint
option: spray paint
Absolutely necessary and fundamental: primer!
All kinds of paint brushes (it’s good to also have brushes with very fine tips)
Now, this is absolutely recommended to create dioramas: an airbrush.
There are lots of types and prices available on Amazon, you might have a look at the reviews to decide on which one to buy.
Visualize Your miniature diorama Projects With The Help Of Sketching
First, you need to think about the project that you want to create, if you already know that, you can skip to the next stage.
What’s important is not to just think about the figurines, but also the background. Is it a stage, theatre, room, outside scene, etc?
Any ideas that you are not using at this moment, you can write down in a notebook to maybe use later.
Then, Start sketching and start visualizing the design. Don’t start too big or too detailed, because that would seem like a waste of time and energy.
Just make sure that the composition is correct and that the pose of the character looks ok.
Does the figurine wear clothes? You might change ideas while drawing. What seems like a good idea at first, could change into something totally different.
You can draw a few ideas in different drawings, and in the end, keep the one that you prefer.
Beware that figurines like this are usually on a scale of 1:10, so that is a little bit less than a scale of 1:12.
Finish the sketching. This means it is time to think further about the details and which materials you are going to use.
This is also the time to think about the angle of the lighting, the Shadows, etc.
If you would to get more details on this, then please check out this course below.
Build a room box with MDF wood, so that means the walls, floor, and ceilings.
To decorate the walls, you can do this in any way you like, wallpaper or paint it, but if you would like some structure, there are so to speak, a thousand ways for doing this.
How To Make A Diorama: Preseting The Teacher And The Course
Who Is The Teacher?
The teacher is called San Martin and he is also active in other fields than creating dioramas: mainly art and painting.
He specialized in painting fantasy figures and fossils, but also science fiction-related things.
It started to get a little bit boring for him and so he was looking to dive into the world of sceneries and miniatures. Thus developing an interest in dioramas.
After developing his techniques, he came to developing pictures for music covers (CDs and DVDs) with the help of dioramas and photographing those.
He is now specialized in this field.
Some Influences.
A few of the influences of this artist were the toys made for science fiction TV that was called “Geyperman” and it was a Spanish action figure.
The reason he likes these kinds of figurines is that he can see what kind of fabrics and textures are used to make this doll and he gets more inspiration from the details.
Another influence to create dioramas was the model-building world.
When you head over to a model shop, you can see what lots of men are building in small sizes and it goes from model airplanes, (military) vehicles, and tanks, to space models, etc, made from plastic and you need to assemble and paint them.
Anything that has something to do with science fiction, like books, movies, series, etc.. 🙂
There is lots more, but that would take us way too far and I would like to refer you to the course itself and his quite enthusiastic explanation 😉
The Price:
At the moment of the writing of this article, the price is $11,99, but this can change.
2 thoughts on “How To Make A Miniature Diorama-Thinking In 3D”
First of all thank you so much for this post. Honestly I heard about this Diorama today. But I love things like this. Also in this post you have been taught how to make them. I made things like this when I was a kid, but I haven’t made them in a while. But when I saw your post, I thought of trying this. I’m ordering stuff with Mac. They will start looking at your post as soon as they arrive. Thanks a lot for my post. Keep posting like this in the future.
First of all thank you so much for this post. Honestly I heard about this Diorama today. But I love things like this. Also in this post you have been taught how to make them. I made things like this when I was a kid, but I haven’t made them in a while. But when I saw your post, I thought of trying this. I’m ordering stuff with Mac. They will start looking at your post as soon as they arrive. Thanks a lot for my post. Keep posting like this in the future.
Hi there!
Thank you for your positive comment and I hope you will work things out soon and I wish you much happiness while creating a nice diorama 🙂
Kind regards,
Lizzy