Day of the Tentacle diorama

I don’t know what it is, but I’m always comforted by designing stuff on a screen before committing to an actual phyiscal “thing”. While carving foam with a craft knife was fun, I always felt like I was just playing – working on a screen makes me organise my thoughts and as soon as I’d decided to use mdf, I knew I’d have to design stuff on a computer a laser cut it.

This gave me a peculiar sense of reassurance.

So it’s exactly what I did.

A bit of PVA glue and some masking tape to hold things together while the glue dried and it wasn’t long before the basic shape was roughed out.

You can see that the angles of the doors and windows don’t exactly match the artwork in the game – but still give the same sense of quirkiness, while fitting in with the physical 3d world.

I primed the entire model then scored lines into the floor to help me when it came to painting the chequerboard floor tiles.

Sadly this is where things started to go wrong! The scorelines created raised areas so I tried to sand them down. In doing so, I sanded some of the primer off the floor.

So I added another layer of primer. Because I’d sanded the surface, this extra layer of paint soaked into the fibres and made the floor look like fuzzy felt! No amount of priming and sanding could get it back to a nice, smooth finish, so I cut out some floor tiles from cardboard and glued them down.

There’s a lot of glue and paint that needs to dry on the model right now, so I’ll have to come back to this later….