Dioramas, Palm Trees, Resin Water, Oh my!

The first half of this year was busy in life but not on the workbench. I went on some great trips to Italy and Star Wars Celebration, but went on very few trips to the model workbench. Part of the problem was that I was dragging my feet on the Scarif diorama pictured above. I had completed the ship builds for all three ships, but I did not have a great plan on how to make a beach scene. I did a lot of research about what products to buy and watched a variety of Youtube videos and finally started to figure something out at the beginning of the summer. I am going to share a little more of my process than usual because I took a few twists and turns during this build.

Water attempt 1: Terrible

I started by using AK Interactive's acrylic sand material as the base on top of some plaster strips shaped for an undulating surface. Then, I used AK Interactive's water gel for the small portion of ocean and absolutely hated how it looked. After the picture above, I re-coated everything with the sand material and decided to try a different method.

Water attempt 2: Way better

Because of the disastrous first attempt, I turned to a method I was previously avoiding out of fear: resin pouring. I watched a few more Youtube videos, bought the supplies and went after it. Fortunately, the whole process of pouring and dyeing the resin was easy and gave a much better result. I would definitely use resin for water again. 

The other important step of the diorama was deciding the layout of the ships. I knew I wanted to show the U-Wing in the process of landing, but I was undecided on the X-Wing and TIE Striker configuration. The hardest part of setting the layout was how high the two smaller ships needed to be in relation to the U-Wing.

This was always the centerpiece of the diorama in my mind.

I finally settled on the two smaller ships raised quite a bit and slightly angled off the base. I only have a small amount of space to work with, and I probably would have benefited from a larger diorama base, but I did not have the luxury of that much display area. I am fairly happy with the result. It has a relatively small base footprint and still manages to include all three small ships.

I really like the angle of this shot.

One of the last bits of the diorama was the wave effects on the water. I used a different water effects product from AK Interactive, which worked much better than the previously mentioned one. By combining a little white paint with the water effects gel, I was able to give the waves some white caps.

Overall, I am happy with this diorama, but I will probably avoid them for a while because of the amount of display space they require, as well as the amount of additional products needed. I will definitely take the experience from this and the Hoth diorama into potential future projects, however.