Odds, Sods n ......Stuffs. A Medley of Mayhem

And It’s done! A long time in the making this diorama was one of those projects that was a real challenge and a great ‘leveling up’  piece and one that I am really really rather proud of now that its all finished. I scratch built as much as possible from materials on hand and/or from my garden. But let’s start at the beginning.

The miniatures in this piece are an older and very OOP vignette from Reaper Miniatures that my client wanted me to both paint and ‘fit’ into a larger diorama setting. This little duo plus a sanding stone was originally released and called ‘The Druid’s Stone’ and was based on a piece of art by the amazing Keith Parkinson. The sculpting was done by Sandra Garrity. So I had a starting point in Keith’s original art piece.

The plinth was made for me by the fantastic Richard Wharton at Oakwood Studios and after a bit of Dremel carving to deepen a stream channel I laid down the rough contours of the land first with sculpture block bark for the rock formations as well as some stones etc from the garden, bit of Milliput to blend things in and then covered and refined it with some modelling compound from #geekgamingscenics . The main standing stone is part of the original white metal vignette from reaper but it seemed a bit lonely on its own so I sculpted a couple of smaller ones in Milliput. Next was a layer of wet ground texture paint from AK into which was pressed some forest scatter from #rivalcrafts while still wet. After painting all this tufts, flowers and flock as per usual.

The trees……….. ohhh the trees………. (cont. in comments) I wanted to use birch trees and the client has a special thing for birch as well but couldn’t find any tutorials for making birch trees online that produced something I was happy with so decided to just try it myself. We have several birch in the garden so gather up birch twigs was no problem. They were then baked in the oven to fully dry them out and kill off any bugs, spores etc The branches are smaller twigs which I cut to size and pinned n glued onto a larger ‘trunk’ twig to make the main tree structure. The we needed some canopy so I drilled holes into the birch branches and inserted sprigs of seafoam for that. After construction was all done, gave them a spritz of sealant aka watered down mod podge, primed them and then painted them as birchy looking as I could. The foliage is from AK Interactive – Autumn birch foliage. Kinda of a loss mat sort of product with lots of autumn birch leaves in it which you tear off into appropriate pieces and work into the sea foam to hold it. All the extra leaves that fall off were saved and then used later on the ground for leaf litter. Once finished the trees were generously spritzed with mod podge solution and then inserted into drilled holes in the diorama and there you have it!!!