Making a Scene (as usual)

Wow, it has been a long time since I dusted off this project! I had, as usual, the best of intentions of doing more dioramas but just never seemed to be able to fit them into my painting time. Recently though I had a friend hitting a big birthday and I wanted to mark the occasion properly. As usual, despite having plenty of advance warning, I only gave myself two weeks to do the whole thing!

Jack and I worked together in one of those terrible paying, low responsibility jobs you get early in your working life. You know the type, the ones that are incredibly fun if you have the right people around but suck at your soul otherwise. One of the things we bonded over was a love of Star Wars. His favourite era is the Clone Wars stuff so I knew that was the basis for my diorama.

I decided to go with Legion models rather than trying to find 3D prints to suit and that was absolutely a case of not enough time costing me a fortune. Atomic Mass Games aren’t messing with those prices! Thankfully I already had clankers but the hero box to get Anakin, Obi Wan and Rex was a very silly price. I also bought a box the Mantic Alien plants and the box for the final display. Everything else was stuff I had already.

First I cut a piece of plasticard to size to fit the inner measurement of the box. I wanted something I could work on that was sturdy but wouldn’t take up too much of the precious height in the box. I’d built the models I wanted in advance to mock up where everyone was going.

The usual XPS foam wasn’t something I had so I went with EVA craft foam sheets to vary the ground height a little. Some very old slate pieces for rock work. Cheap filler was used to smooth transitions and a healthy coat of AK terrain paste to provide the base texture and a better colour to work up from. 

The colours for the plants were dictated by the Geek Gaming Scenics base ready mix I was using. I bought it for another project but it is far more pink in person than their website so it got put aside. I think I would have found painting them glued to the base more of a hassle if I had had time to do a better detailed paint job but for what I needed, it was fine. The models got painted separately and pinned to the base at the very end. 

The final piece is pretty good though, being me, I see mostly just flaws! I had to keep reminding myself that the birthday boy isn’t a wargamer and wouldn’t notice the lack of multiple highlights. And he’ll never know there was meant to be a plaque on the front. He probably won’t hate the green moss because it is too much… I’m going to stop. It’s good and though I didn’t get to be there for him opening it, I think it went down well.