So this is my first blog post. I'm completely new to this so bear with me, lol! Today I'm showing you guys a somewhat straight forward craft. I'm going to walk you through how I made a small diorama table to display my sylvanian families bakery on. Of course you can use any building or scene you like. Because I have so many sylvanian bakeries, sometimes I have to make separate dioramas just to have a scene to display them all on. Now for the table I'll tell you what I used. I just buy those little cheap 20" x 20" side tables with the screw on legs from walmart. They make excellent tables for dioramas. They are small and short, great play tables that can be slid out of the way if needed.
For the street and the sidewalk I used two different forms of foam board. I always like using the thinner foam board for streets, and for sidewalks I usually spend a little more to get the nice thicker foam board. I cannot recall what thickness it is. But the photo below should give you a general idea of how it compares in thickness to the basic foam board. I recommend wetting both before peeling the paper off, otherwise it is a struggle removing the paper coating on both sides and you'll need to do so in order to sculpt your stonework detail in the foam.
The next step I didn't go into a lot of detail as far as showing you pictures so I will try to describe what I did. Basically I used my tabletop to lay on top of the thin foam board and I traced out the shape of the table. I then cut and glue the thin foam board to the tabletop so that is covers the entire surface - you'll want the sidewalk to look even on the road so this is the easiest way to achieve that. Afterwards I decided how wide I wanted my street. I usually use sylvanian vehicles to give myself an ideal of how wide I need a road to be. I usually make them wide enough to display one car. If I wanted to have a two lane road I would need a wider tabletop, since I need to keep in mind there has to be room for a building and walkway for citizens. After attaching the sidewalk I lay something heavy on top of the foam boards and let them dry completely before moving on to the next step which is sculpting.
As you can see in the image above some of my glue seeped its way through, but that's okay because we can cover that up with some weeds later. The tool I use to sculpt my stonework is a small paint mixing tool (I'm not sure what they call it so please forgive me, lol!) I use the smallest size which has a small flat tip, this is perfect for creating the grout look between stones and bricks. I started working on the sidewalk first. I recommend keeping in mind how real stone sidewalks or roads typically look. This is a rather long process but I find that working this was achieves a better result. It doesn't need to always be 100% even or perfect because aged roads and sidewalks often look uneven at times. I used a ruler to help me keep the brick stones pretty close in size. Some of them are rectangles and others are squares. It adds character if they are a little different in shape.
Once that's done I take a wadded up ball of tinfoil and just kind of roll it and gently press it all over the sidewalk. This will really bring it to life, especially when you start adding paint.
Next I moved on to the road which is an old cobblestone look. I used the same method that I used on the sidewalk, including rolling over it with the tinfoil ball. The road took much longer because there are so many tiny stones. Now there are much easier methods for doing this. Ashmimi actually used a handful of straws taped together in various sizes to get a cobblestone look in her town. Unfortunately that method did not want to work for me. I obviously didn't do something right, lol! So I decided to just take my time and create my stones individually. They do look more realistic that way, but again, it's very time consuming. I just worked in sections. Luckily it's a small table but I can't imagine doing this on a bigger scene!
So this is what the diorama is looking like before getting to the painting part. Wow, almost done with those cobblestones! My hand is tired!
So I don't want to elaborate on how I painted this because it's relatively easy. There's not much to say and I think I can explain this where you guys will easily understand. Basically you just decide on your base color. I used darker greys and painted the entire sidewalk and street. This darker color is what adds detail to the cracks and grout. After that dries I go over the bricks and the cobblestones with lighter colors using my finger. It's much easier because you don't want the lighter color going into the cracks and grout, that takes away from the detail. I did do a little dry brushing on the cobblestone to speed things up, but on the sidewalk my finger was my main tool.
There were a few places that I accidentally messed up and got light grey paint in the grout, so I used a thin brush to correct it. It pays to take you time! But below you can see how the darker base color adds realism to a scene. And the highlight color on tops really brings it to life! I also added some moss grass to act as old weeds growing up around the sidewalk to cover up where there was exposed glue.
So here is the finished diorama. It turned out pretty neat! I made a little lamp post to match the bakery using foam paper, a straw, some acrylic paints, and clear plastic from toy packaging. If you want there's a pretty easy way to make the lamp post light up! Maybe I will do a tutorial on that! Oh! And I also printed out a Sylvanian Families logo to go on the front of the table. Cute, huh?
Now since my favorite bakery is the star of this diorama I decided I would decorate it a little and add more to it. It's pretty simple, I just measured and cut scrapbook paper and applied it to the walls using double sided tape. I printed up posters and labels to display around the shop. I added more bakery treats from other playsets, I painted the little table and chairs that are on the deck, I added a refrigerator to the shelf to display milk and butter in using foam board, clear plastic and dollhouse hinges. It doesn't make much sense to just have cold items sitting on a dry shelf, so I thought it would be a nice feature. The bakery is a lot more colorful and inviting now.
Alright that's it for now! Hope you guys enjoyed this :)
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