i am sure this has been asked a million times, but what are some good ways to make walls, buildings and roads in 1/35, I am doing a dio of a city battle between germans and US late in wwii. my expariment with sheetrock failed, miserably, so know im back at square one, any ideas? Ohh yea and rubble and things like doors and chairs

Here is how I make cobblestone roads.
I glue lentils to the base I am using with white glue. Once I have all the road portions covered, I spray it with craft glue just to make sure it all holds together.
Next I take a wall filler and cover the road, leaving the rounded top of the lentils exposed. After all is covered I smooth the wall filler with a wet finger. If need be so, in the end I sand the areas covered with filler. Check references for painting guide.

Cheers,

~CDT Reimund Manneck
U.S. Army ROTC

Hi,

This article at DOC DIO is a step by step construction diorama with a ruin and lots of rubble.

Hope it helps

Several products come in handy for this kind of work : cardboard, balsa wood, and most of all plaster of paris !
You can carve more or less the cardboard... use the balsa to represent different wooden parts of buildings (I'm using it for floorboards) or paint it...
You can cast the plaster to produce walls. Then, it is rather easy to carve.

For more information, look at the threads started by demoldouver... You'll see what can be done out of plaster... :-) :-) :-) :-)

I have seen lots of dioramas but I do not remember seeing one (especially of street scenes) with broken glass. Usually in a debris filled street broken glass is everywhere. Does anyone have a good method for simulating sheets of broken glass and glass shards? I would like to add some to the groundwork of a single figure 101st AB figure.

Hi,

You can use some acrilic sheet cut in pieces - glass allways breaks in sharp edges.

Hey, I'm no more a Private.

Good timing! I have recently written a 5 chapter article on "Building a Diorama from Scratch". I was going to sell it to one of my regular magazine publishers, but after talking with Jim, decided to make it available exclusively online here at Armorama... just testing the market to see if the articles do as well here as they do on paper. If it goes well, i will publish more this way.

In essence, we start with a design concept in 1:35 scale, transfer it to matt board, and then build it from there. What we wind up with easily rivals anything you could buy in a pre-fabed The actual piece is quite large ( a full street with 4 buildings, alley ways, a warf, bridge, canal, and all the accoutrements. While I don't expect everyone to build monsterously large dios like this, buy doing several buidlings together, you can see a wide variety of techniques for buildings and architecture.

This document is meant to be read online, or can be downloaded and printed. It includes the first 15-20 steps (about 10-12 oages), and is loaded with color photographs showing what is done and how. As I said, it was meant orignally to be a magazine article series, so the format will look just like what you might normally read in MMir or Finescale Models.

The first chapter will be free, and if you like what you see, the entire eBook is available for $9.95 on CD-ROM shipped to your door (more details to come on how to order through Armorama). The final document is about 35 pages in length, and has over 100 color photos. It looks great when printed on a laser printer, and even better when printed in color!

Okay- so there is a bit of an add, but at the same time you may find a lot of answers and ideas.

Keith

In response to BobTavis:

The best thing to use for glass is, well, glass. I have used microscope slides, though some are kind of thick. Put in a ziplock plastic bag, cover with a towel, get it a couple whacks with the side of a hammer, and you have instant glass shards. Be VERY, VERY CAREFUL with these as they will cut you like razors if you are not.

A safer and almost as convincing solution is to use some of that thin, stiff, clear plastic that everything we buy these days seems to come wrapped in. Cut it into various sizes of triangles with a pair of sharp scissors. The supply is limitless. Once you get the hang of it, it will go quick and look good. Add "cracks" to big pieces by scribing with an XActo.

Bob

the problem i can see with real glass is putting it down, cuase its sharp it would be hard to move with out cutting yourself

My Schwimmie dio is suffering from lack of time, but here´s a couple of work in rogress pics:

A colouring sketch with title plate

The base: photo frame and cardboard.

Some wall putty to make places for ponds of water:

Doing it the hard way: stones carved out with a blade:

...and some paintjob over it.

I still have the water to apply.
If I only saw this topic earlier, I would have probably taken another course
I´m still pretty happy with the result as I feel this kind of road needs assymmetric design...
Comments?

Toni

pics don't show... the url looks a bit weird...

Should be ok now, I just messed up with it...
ArmoramA feels very slow for me today...

Toni

Showing now.. btw.. its slow on this side of the world too....

Envar.. you're such a talent!!! Can't believe this becomes your second dio..

The street looks pdg to me!!! :-) :-)

Referring to Schwimmie dio pics on page one in this topic...

Proceeding to make the water....
I only need a couple of ponds, I thought about going for some clear varnish.

Better ideas?

Toni

Better than varnish... try this....

First, cut some clear plastic (or glass, if you want to get REAL fancy!) in the shape of the "pond". Paint a few water streaks (use enamel browns on the top, greens on the bottom). This creates a certain sense of 3D depth. Put this in place. Now come back and layer on 4 coats of FUTURE floor wax. a little brownish modeling clay around the edges will give the "evaporated water and mud" effect, and also "seals in your edges perfectly. The affect is great for "depth" and gloss. Best looking water I have ever seen... the only way i do it now! i will post this as a Digital Diamond this week to give you a visual concept of what I'm talking about... email me if you have questions!

Keith

Looking good Envar! Looks like a pretty labor intensive way of doing it, but it the result is fabulous.

-Paul

Envar,
Wow, I have to admit you are very inspiering! Both the sniper and now this, Im wanting to build a small vehicle to use with my figures as this is my main interest, your pics might just have pushed me "over" the edge to doing it!! Keep us posted, it looks great so far!

Toni I am impressed by your results!

MSW

Go Leafs Go!

Envar,
Your diorama looks great so far, and so realistic! Great idea. Hope it turns out well. One queation though, how di you get that street paint job looking so good?

Thnks,
Mark :-)

Heh. This kind of results you can expect when you don´t have the slightest idea how the material reacts with different colours! I took it as a general principle not to try anything out before the final execution. Why? Because whether it worked or not, it will definitely be interesting! And I have fever to get it done.
Anyway, the base is plaster-like material so i went for some acrylics and watercolour first. After carving the edges of stones I gave it a sepia ink wash. I love that stuff. It was also used to prepare the places for water.
In an effort to display convincing variation in cobblestone road, I painted a few stones here and there with a different colour. After that I just rubbed it with my bare hand. At some spots the paint was still moist and it went off, revealing some of the white putty underneath.
That´s what I call drybrushing!

Sorry, hard to tell about this as I was basically messing around with it...
My first time with cobblestone, water, stones..

Toni

Thanks a lot Envar. I'm starting a huge diorama in my basemenon a table i made. I was going to do a sort of downtown look with a cobblestone road or something like that connected to a a dirt road leading out of town to a make-shift American base or camp. If I have enough time i might even build up some land and make a bridge...maybe?
I was wondering if anyone has any good ideas i could use to make it look better or more realistic.

Mark

P.S. Hey Envar, love your style on drybrushing!

Heh, go for it! Just don´t use the same technique as I did! Carving a big piece of cobblestone road may be the last project of your life...


Drybrushing, yeah! Only that in this case the lighter accents were a result of skratching the paint off instead of adding some! I works well though with plaster-like water-soluble materials. We might call it "wetbrushing"?


Toni

I searched around the web and found a technique with using lentils. I think I'll try that. Ya know, I want to finish this project sometime!


I think that we should! :-)

Thanks,
Mark

Lentils...sounds good!
Now I´m hungry.

Mark, you´re really lucky to have a basement where you can build something BIIIG! What scale it´s gonna be? In 1:35, sounds like a 2x2meters dio to me!


Toni :-)

The table is actually 58 sq. ft. It's a big table on the unfinished side of my basement. I'm doing it in 1/35. I'm still unsure wheter to use the whole table. It has a big open space in the middle of it so you can be in the middle of all the action. Sorry, its hard to explain, and I can't figure out how to stick a picture right into the post.

Mark