Tales of my first Diorama - A beach story [Build process -Picture heavy]

I would like to share my first ever Diorama I built.  

I recently got the Honoka figure and immediate thought she would be best in a Beach setting.  I was itching to flex my creative muscle and wanted to try my hand at diorama building.  It was a fun experience overall but I made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Here was my Journey.

Finished product




I started with a 12 inch Square wooden board and some 1 inch foam board.  


I glued the foam board to the wood and then chipped a gradual slope into the form.    This was really hard as I don't have any good tools but a hobby knife.  I made a mess slowly whittling away the foam.
After this I took some plaster of Paris and coated the whole thing


Then quickly airbrushed a sand color paint all over.


Now I took some spray adhesive to the platform to glue on the sand.   I initially made the mistake of just piling on adhesive and sand with out letting it dry thinking I would get some volume but it just turned into a wet globs of sand.  I had to scrap and re-do this step.  [First major mistake]


In prep for adding the water portion,  I ripped a wooden platform for and used the pieces to wall off 3 sides and hot glue sealed it  [This was a big mistake, as I should have taped the boards first so the resin would pull off easier]  
I added some small starfish I bought from Amazon.


Now I prepped some epoxy resin and added some Blue Dye [My second mistake here was I added too dark a dye].  Then proceeded to pour the mixture in.  Thumbs crossed as this was the first time I've ever used epoxy resin.


Now I wanted to added some water effect to the top of the water and used some AK interactive Water Gel effect.  I've used this once before so I knew I had to slather a lot as it dries semi clear [Third mistake here was I should have done this last as I needed to sand around it when cleaning up the edges]


Ripping the boards now now showed me my 2nd mistake in not properly adding tape the the boards and was a pain to pull off and damaged some of the resin.

Luckily it wasn't too bad and was able to salvage by spending a lot of time sanding it.

Now for the pièce de résistance I wanted to add a crab to the scene
so I went to Thingiverse and found a 3d model of a crab that was scanned from a real crab.   I scaled this down to 1/6 and printed this in my resin printer

The model was too delicate and snapped a claw off when removing the print.   I was able to glue it back on rather than re-print.

Now I primed the crab in white then went to airburst it in a base coat of Brown, then added red.  


Now I took a brush to added the white highlights and did a brown wash to add texture.


Finally I think I'm done.  
Thanks for joining me on my journey.  
I think I'll try my hand at doing more custom dioramas.  I picked a beach scene as it's more organic a didn't need much elaborate detailing.

Wow! That actually turned out great, despite all the heartache. If it’s any consolation, if you hadn’t point out the issues, I never would have spotted them. Nicely done. Now you need to print some background images to put behind it.

Kitsune, you may have had a few learning moments in the process, but the final result looks gorgeous. My sand surfaces have been either improvised with cloth or otherwise temporary creations with kinetic sand, so this more permanent and attractive base is really impressive to me -- and I've never even tried anything with water effects. If the crab is still loose, I would display it at a bit of an angle (don't they walk sideways anyway?).

Looks great, but I like the water more before you added the water effects. It looks a bit overdone to me, although sometimes it does look like that, so it's more a personal preference.

Excellent!

Wow, this is very creative and dedicated -- for your first diorama, that is very ambitious and I think it turned out great! Looking forward to seeing what you do with the background...

Wow ! Really great Base. With a starfish under the water !The crab looks so real, after Your paint job. Very inspiring. Thanks for showing

Great result - You did a great job. I know my first epoxy water base was a disaster as I couldn't keep it from leaking

I also love the crab. Well done

This is quite ingenious! Thank you for sharing the detailed steps and the entire trial-and-error process!

One question - how did you get the "wet sand" effect at the water's edge? Is that a thin coating of the epoxy resin?

Thanks everyone for the praise.    I'm not very good yet at Diorama's wanted to try my hand since I have a lot of the tools  (Resin 3D printer, Airbush etc).  I'm just leaning on my skills for painting scale model kits and wanted to try something different.   I'm thinking my next project will be stonework and wood type buildings, I'm not sure how much I want to "cheat" and lean on the 3d printer rather than doing a lot of the scratch building.

davidd wrote:This is quite ingenious! Thank you for sharing the detailed steps and the entire trial-and-error process!

One question - how did you get the "wet sand" effect at the water's edge? Is that a thin coating of the epoxy resin?

Yes  when I poured the resin,  I let it drip beyond the resting area to give it the wet look.  I saw others use a glossy varnish but I lucked out and didn't need to do this.

I would add that, if you know how to print objects correctly in your 3D printer, and even more so if you also know how to design them (or modify existing designs), there is a lot of impressive skill and knowledge in that too. So I don't know to what extend using the 3D printer would be cheating. Your diorama building would doubtless be a combination of different things. If you managed to 3D print a whole masonry wall backdrop, or example, that too would be impressive (not to mention very practical).

I also would have kept the foam more subtle, but this is a great dio!! Beautiful work, especially the crab.
I'm looking forward to seeing where you'll take this!

Awesome job! The things you did right overweigh the mistakes I think.

I think I downloaded exactly the same crab model once, for similar purposes. (Want to make a rather large beach, not sure if I want to dedicate this much space yet. Maybe it can be stored as a wall decoration)
Used those tiny starfish for figures too.
The way you airbrushed the crab is very realistic and clever.

Nice mask in the back, is it multi part or do you just have a very large resin printer?

Diana wrote:I also would have kept the foam more subtle, but this is a great dio!! Beautiful work, especially the crab.
I'm looking forward to seeing where you'll take this!

I'll likely restrain myself next time,  I was thinking the same but the end results still looks good IMO,  I decided to go "Bigger" as I made the mistake of using a less transparent dye and you couldn't see though it very well and epoxy resin was the most expensive part of this build that I wanted to salvage it.

Ovy wrote:Awesome job! The things you did right overweigh the mistakes I think.

I think I downloaded exactly the same crab model once, for similar purposes. (Want to make a rather large beach, not sure if I want to dedicate this much space yet. Maybe it can be stored as a wall decoration)
Used those tiny starfish for figures too.
The way you airbrushed the crab is very realistic and clever.

Nice mask in the back, is it multi part or do you just have a very large resin printer?

The Fox mask?  I did that in a standard FDM printer.   Though I have a 10 inch SLA printer and probably could have done in there it would have been expensive and the detail wasn't as complex to have needed it.  Though this is sill a WIP as the downside of the FDM is that I had to do excessive sanding and still need to finish that.  I'm thinking of airbrushing some of the UV resin on top I saw someone on YouTube doing as a way to smooth PLA prints.

For what it's worth I thought the foam looked fine as it is. It's truly an impressive first diorama, and I have no doubt your future efforts will be even moreso!

Your diorama looks great. 3D-printing seems to be real help in generating these little details that make a diorama realistic.  

despite the things you mentioned gone wrong, the final result looks awesome. plus learning from others experience is even more valuable so one won't have to go through the same lessons, my thanks.
as for 3d printing, i don't consider it cheating being itself sometimes a kind of a chore and a hair pulling one at that . so even if its another set of skills, its skill nontheless.
As for the epoxy resin, does it by chance emmit toxic fumes? i'd like to experiment with that stuff at some point but have no ways of proper ventilation in my workspace.
kind regards

Tjolnir wrote:despite the things you mentioned gone wrong, the final result looks awesome. plus learning from others experience is even more valuable so one won't have to go through the same lessons, my thanks.
as for 3d printing, i don't consider it cheating being itself sometimes a kind of a chore and a hair pulling one at that  . so even if its another set of skills, its skill nontheless.
As for the epoxy resin, does it by chance emmit toxic fumes? i'd like to experiment with that stuff at some point but have no ways of proper ventilation in my workspace.
kind regards

Uncured resin is slightly toxic and more of a skin irritant, in this case it was such a small amount 8oz total so I didn't seem to be bother much by any vapors. Though I do use gloves and eye projection. I would Google safety precautions on this and say that eye protection is a must. I find 3d printer UV resin to be worse to work with in terms of vapors and use a respirator when working close with it when ventilation is not an option.

For being the first it's a very good looking diorama, getting water effects done well can be a bit complicated at times too specially when working with dyes. It's a great set piece for your figure too.

I concur with all the praise so far, this is very well executed for a first, and your practical methods have paid off through trial and error. But that's sometimes part of the fun with craft building, it's like an experiment you can keep trying different techniques for different results. Also, even though you used a darker dye than intentioned for this version of the shore, I think it would still work really well for a night-time scene of the beach. Throw a starry skied background in there and that would be beautiful.

looks great! I really like how the crab turned out as well, looks so real!