Making a Diorama: Environment
Techniques for diorama scenery vary widely and there are a ton of resources on building scenery for model railroads and tabletop gaming. I learned mostly through trial and error and experimentation. Each piece will require a different approach depending on whether it has hills, water, trees, snow, etc. Here is one example where I construct a scene in an alien forest. When building alien and fantasy settings, off-the-shelf materials like model grass may not be appropriate.
I wanted this piece to have contours so I dug out this foam backdrop that came with a reptile terrarium. If you don't have something like this, you can carve your own out of styrofoam. My figures were already made so I had to ensure they had a sufficiently flat place to lie. The foam on its own was too contoured and I needed to fill in gaps to level out parts of it.
First, I draped sheets of plastered gause to create a strenthened and textured base to build on. I also punched holes in the wood base and inserted armatures for trees that would be built later. For leveling, I decided to use a kind of plaster meant for sculpting terrain. It has mica and some other stuff in it to give it bulk but other kinds of plaster can also be used, like hydrocal.
I sculpted the tree bases out of epoxy clay, draping roots over the earth. Since the diorama would be photographed at ground level and from above, I did not bother making the entire tree with its canopy but allowed the boughs to terminate at a certain height.
I put roots in the foreground to suggest that there are trees in front as well.
I added another layer of plaster to unify everything. I placed the figures and pushed them into the wet plaster so they would leave an imprint. This would ensure they are properly interacting with the terrain and not floating above it. It's like inverse kinematics for animation but applied to the terrain instead.
I sealed everything with dilute PVA glue tinted brown. Be aware that this will make things shiny and wet and if you want things to look dry you may want to apply it judiciously, only where necessary to hold things down. If the diorama had grass, I would apply it to a layer of wet glue, allow it to dry, spray with diluted PVA to seal it, then sprinkle a layer of model grass on top to hide the shine before it dries.
Whenever I'm outside I always have my eye out for natural materials I can use in scenery. I keep jars of seed pods, twigs, bark, and other plant bits. The best materials don't betray their original identity at miniature scale. This diorama uses seaweed floatation pods and these wasp galls I collected from leaf litter ten years prior. The wasp galls were reimagined as alien plants and appeared in later illustrations such as this one.
I made leaf litter by forcing real dried leaves through a sieve.
