Working in my studio to create a diorama

Creating a diorama from scratch

Creating a May, 1940 French Village

I used Depron foam board to create the building facades, carving in the brick work with a sharpened ice cream stick and cutting out the windows with a hobby knife and T-square

Laying out the Diorama of a French Village

Laying out the dimensions of the diorama on Pink foam for spacing

Making brick walls

A simple way to make brick walls by scribing with small screwdriver and T-square. YOu can make missing or broken bricks by using the screwdriver. to crush or cut out individual bricks,.

Cutting out the bridge halves

I used a simple jigsaw to cut the rounded edges of the bridge abutments that I sketched onto foam

Making French Village house

On one side of the house, I used Spackle to imitate stucco siding that is peeling away showing the Brick underlay as seen in many European houses.

Building a French village house

After cutting out the dimensions of the house with a hobby knife, I placed doll house windows and door into the scribed brick facing prior to attaching all 4 sides together

Creating a french village building

I used pink insulation foam board to make the basic house structure. Each corner was glued together with foam adhesive and used stick pins to keep it all together until dry. The roof was made with foam core board and them shingles were glued on in layers

Constructing the buildings

Plan and lay out the dimensions of each building, using a T-Square and hobby knife to cut out a V shaped channel at each corner edge to easily bend the corners. There are lots of how to videos on Youtube describing this technique

Laying out the French Village Diorama

Begin the planning process by laying out the dimensions of the base using depron for the road and insulation board for the under base

Painting the base

Building the base

The base was built with pink insulation board and Depron foam board for the road, then spray painted with gray primer,

Making a foam core board building

After making the foam core building, I used paint samples mixed up at Home Depot with ROLL-A-TEX fine sand additive that gives a nice texture to the paint. Paint samples are cheap and come in thousands of colors.

Creating a base for the May, 1940 French Village

I used different thicknesses of pink foam insulation to build the base. I used Depron foam board to create the cobblestone street, the brick facing on the base, and several of the buildings

Windows and doors for dioramas

You can find a whole selection of doll house windows and doors in scale from multiple vendors on eBay-always check the dimensions before buying as there are many different scales. I use black spray primer as undercoat.