Templar Tomb

I managed to get quite a bit done with the planning and initial building of the my Templar Diorama. I did a very rough initial sketch to see how it would look. I wanted some stain glass windows, small columns (possibly painted wood), church pews and a group of priests, monks and a group of returning Templars praying at the tomb.

I looked at painted examples of churches down in England with surviving medieval murals (think the Scottish reformation did a better job of removing art from churches, as I couldn’t find any examples up here) and of contemporary paintings of Templars and knights, and then started to draw and paint my versions of these. I then scanned my paintings and tidied them up a bit in Inkscape (a vector graphics programme).

This is a project I was working on late last year, but it just got shelved due to life and work getting in the way. I had got into photogrammetry and 3D printing a few years ago, and I got a chance to scan a templar’s stone sarcophagus as part of a workshop at Saltcoats Museum. I also managed to help out on a volunteer dig at Ardrossan Castle and got to see the nearby ruins of Ardrossan Church, where the sarcophagus was found in 1912. The upshot of this was an attempt to use a mix of a 3D scan of the sarcophagus, a bit of digital sculpting and a lovely miniature from Vinci Miniatures to create a reconstruction diorama of how the coffin would have looked in the church during the medieval period.

I realised after a bit more research that I got a few things wrong, such as; the sarcophagus was set into the churches floor when it was found, the columns I sculpted were a bit small (and its not entirely clear if there were any there in the first place), the churches walls were probably covered with plaster and like a lot of churches of that time would have been garishly painted.

So I decided to redo the reconstruction and make it bigger and try to make it more accurate, with the eventual plan being to pass it on to the local museum or historical society. I’m still using a bit of 3D printing but to save a bit of time I decided to not sculpt my own bits and use models from Scan the World, Tiny Furniture, TableTop Miniatures and Reconquer Designs (all from MyMiniFactory) to speed up the process with the rest being built with a mix of XPS foam, balsa wood, milliput and build it onto a cheap picture frame from B&Q. I do want to do the church wall paintings myself, so I’m going to try and create slide transfers from my own drawings and paintings rather than try and freehand stuff which I’m not great at.

Hopefully, I’ll actually get this all done by June and not have to go for Spring Clean 2026.