Laputa Diorama – Part 6

Hi everyone,

Today is the last installment of this series, and I will be talking about the figures mostly and one or two other things.  Overall this will not be a very long post - I promise!

First off I would like to thank everyone who followed this series with me.  I have to admit it was a journey of discovery so to speak.  Changing my normal modeling medium forced me to learn new techniques and try out new methods of painting and building.  I had to move out of my comfort zone and it did me a world of good.  I plan to do this again when I finish the 3 dioramas I have pending and start doing some Gunpla modeling!

Well back to the subject at hand.  The figures in the diorama are in 1/20 scale and that is roughly 90mm for a six foot adult male.  Naturally the little princess is smaller than 90mm and the robot taller as well, but both fit the scale.

I will start off with the princess.  She is easy to put together and is easy to paint - there! In a nutshell.  Really, she comes in four parts- body, back skirt, legs and back of head.  All pieces fit together fairly well and only a little filling is necessary. 


As for painting, I painted the face by hand, but the skirt by airbrush.  The face gave me a lot of trouble at first as I have hardly any experience at painting females - let alone little girls.  I found out the hard way that less shading is much better.  But in the end learn I did.  For anyone a bit adventurous or with more time than I had - you can really put in a lot of detail into the dress.  Personally, I wanted to keep it as accurate and close to the animated film as possible.

As for the robot gardener, this took up more work.  First off I had to reposition his fingers on the left hand and the right foot.  Unlike most Gunpla, this kit is not very articulated, and it does not come with different hand poses like most High Grade kits from Bandai for example.





Once again, cutting up takes planning and calculation it you want everything to fall into place.  For example, great tip I learned from a colleague is to number the fingers before cutting them.  This way you know which finger goes where when it comes to refitting them.  Otherwise the repositioning did not take much time or brain power to accomplish.

Painting the robot at first gave me a lot of problems.  Because of its size and wide spaces I could not paint it up with a brush without the striations becoming visible.  So I had to resort to an airbrush.  Once again, due to my lack of experience, I ended up spraying the robot several times until I was more or less happy with the results.  Even then only grudgingly so!




I was also asked from where I bought the base for the bonsai in the diorama.  The answer is from no where.  I actually made it from Styrofoam.  I cut out the basic shape, then cut out any excess and simply sandpapered until I got the shape I desired.  Yep, that simple.
Well that is all for now.  I just wanted to add that in the coming weeks I will be adding a gallery page where you can see pictures of the finished dioramas, vignettes and figures.  I hope this does not take too long.

Until next time - farewell and good health!