1/43 scale car diorama location - bamboo foreast and Asian monestry

Bonjour, messieurs et dames!

From time to time the desire comes to me to make some kind of diorama, or something for photographs of my 1/43 collection. It all started relatively recently. I made the location of Takumi Fujiwara’s house, the pit lane, the garage studio, and the last successful one – a cyberpunk garage. I learned some experience from my mistakes, which I decided to apply in a new photo location.

Initially, I planned to simply copy the bamboo forest location in Kyoto (like that one from Gran Turismo 4), but then it went away. I thought that there would be few angles for shooting on it, and overall it would be a bit boring (just as I was bored with the garage-studio and the pitlane).

While surfing around the city, you often come across small temples, pagodas, and chapels. Carved, painted, beautiful. But they are all Chinese. And the forest is in Kyoto… so, does it really matter in the fantasy world of dioramas? I started looking for 3D printing services in the city to print a cool pagoda. Locals charged a hefty price tag, that it would be wiser to take own 3D printer and learn a new business. But not yet. So…what to do with the chapel? There is little free time, and laziness…. as a prototype, i took a random one met in the city. Rectangular, with a minimum of interior. So I decided that the new photo location would be a sandy area, with a Chinese chapel standing on a concrete pedestal behind it, bamboo growing around… but I wanted more Japan. So I made a beautiful red toria =)

But more about everything in details. For those who are not interested in the process, I hope you like the result. At this location there will be separate posts with different 1/43 model cars, but here is a more general view of the result and a couple of shots from future sets.

Parts of the diorama:

Diorama base is 5 cm foamboard.
Chapel: 3mm cardboard, 1mm wood, color print. Roof – cardboard, toothpicks.

The chapel is glued to the podium. The podium is couple of 5 mm PVC. The ladder is made from the same pvc. Paint, raised pebbles-wallpaper around the perimeter.

…Next is the most interesting…
Since there is no concrete floor or imitation asphalt here, which is done quite simply, I took a 10-minute course on YouTube about decorative sand and how to use it.

Model sand is suitable. Taking it from the beach was not an option, the sand particles there are too big and do not match the scale that well.

Where the light sand should turn into ground land, I made a small hill the entire length of clay. Once everything had stuck well, I applied a special water-base diorama glue (Scenic glue S190). Reminds me of PVA, white color. Once applied, I carefully sprinkled sand where it should be. After 2 minutes, I shook off the excess sand. ..apparently it was applied poorly, resulting in several bald spots. I carefully added sand, and this time I dissolved the glue in the lid with water, and used a pipette to drop the solution onto new fresh sand. The glue spread evenly, gluing the particles together.

Ground: This is dark sand, which is partially mixed with sawdust and green grass, for a more inlive ground in the bamboo forest. Probably needed more sawdust?

Used same model glue to fix pebbles that I collected from the beach.

As it turned out, the glue is super strong after a while. The surface became like stone, almost indestructible.

The next step was quite painfull… Pegs on both sides connected by rope. Pegs – cut wooden skewers. Rope – is a rope. The height of the peg is approximately 1 cm. I made notches on the top of the peg for convenience, and alternately wrapped the rope around each one, dripping superglue onto the turn. It was very difficult… Because everything is small for human finger. Next, I glued this chain of pegs to the sand with silicone glue. It also took couple of hours to get sticked well.

click to enlarge

Red beautiful toria. I’m proud of this. The base is plastic tubes. The top is a sandwich made of two planes of 2 mm wood, supports along the edges to give shape. To make it all fit properly, I used superglue. Liquid metal was forced inside with a stick and a finger. When it had hardened an hour later, I cut off superfluous and sanded off the excess to give it the final shape. This 2-component liquid metal just stinks of ***** . I sawed the base of tubes to give the desired angle and glued it to the top part. The middle bar is a 3 pieces of PVC cardboard. The symbol on the torii in the middle is 車, the traditional Chinese and Japanese word for “machine, car etc”.

Bamboo is something I haven’t made myself. That would be too much. I sow how fierce DIYers make trees out of wire/clay/paint, etc… but this amount of bamboo would take me more than 10 minutes of time, so I just ordered it from Taobao in 9 minutes. Height 15 cm. Easy to install. Use a thin screwdriver to make a hole in the foam sand. Then put it in, that’s it.

Oh, the golden Chinese lions at the chapel are also purchased. I bought it a long time ago, and now I have found a worthy use.

Experience/past mistakes:

if you don’t have a garage or a spare room for a hobby, but you are going to use the self made photo location very often, you CANNOT make a prefabricated diorama. This will take up a lot of your time arranging objects, car stands, etc. I think that you need to decide on the idea, make scenarios for photo angles, and make 80-90% of the entire interior monolithic. Yes, this is expensive in terms of decor items, but it will save nerves and time. This is exactly what I did with the last cyber garage diorama, and it is simply a masterpiece for me.
Always use a foundation base (3-5 cm solid modeling foam). It makes the whole diorama easy to asemble and easy to carry. I made a large pitlane on a 0.5 cm sheet and it was a huge mistake.
Polymer clay, liquid metal, and a solution of PVA model glue can work wonders.

There are already new thoughts about the future photo location in 1/43 scale. But if this happens, it will be very later. Until then, this one!