A Christmas Diorama 2016

Christmas is slowly approaching, which means that it’s time for yet another Christmas Diorama. Last year my husband put together a small outdoor Christmas Diorama, which I painted.
We decided to do another one again this year, but this time it’ll be a bit more complex.

The scene/story is set in Santa Claus’ home, where a young Mrs. Clause has brought her hot friend over, where together they’ll  surprise Santa Claus when he returns home after a long day of work delivering presents.

So the very first thing was to start building a floor and some walls. We cut out some styrofoam to use as walls and used some cardboard (Was actually a component from a board game) for the bottom. Below you can see the very first picture of the project, after 1 layer of plaster on the styrofoam walls.

Walls & Bottom #1

Miniatures & Furniture

We decided to use The Medieval Fireplace from Fenryll as the primary furniture in the diorama, setting up the scene around the large fireplace. As Mrs. Clause we’ll be using Mrs. Clause and Schnauzers from Dark Sword Miniatures and as Mrs. Clause’s naughty friend – Christmas Sophie 2009 from Reaper Miniatures without her wings!

The next picture shows the walls glued onto the bottom and two wooden sticks added to the top. Sophie is resting by the fireplace inside.

Walls & Floor #2

The Floor

Next up was the flooring, we cut up some wooden sticks (Lots of wooden sticks!) and glued them onto the cardboard bottom. After all the sticks was glued onto the cardboard, it was time to cut off the pieces that were too long.

And finally a finished wooden floor!

Christmas Diorama Flooring #3

The Santa Claus

Choosing the Santa Claus miniature ended up being a rather easy choice, as this Reaper Santa Claus has the perfect surprised look over him.
Two pictures of the finished miniature below, ready to be placed in the diorama – A door and a couple of stairs will be added to the diorama, Santa will be standing on the top step, as if he just walked through the door.

Framed Picture

We wanted to add a framed picture or two to the diorama. The first idea was to add some sort of picture of Mr. & Mrs. Clause.. But we scrapped that idea as we couldn’t find a picture that we found suitable. Instead we decided to go for a painting of santa’s cozy house/cabin. Below you can see the picture frame (From Thomarillion) primed black with a couple of the pictures printed out, in case one or more ended up bad. On the second picture the frame is painted and the painting added, now it’s just waiting to be hung up inside the diorama!

The Entrance:

As mentioned in an earlier update, the Santa Claus will be standing right in front of a door, as if he just entered. The door and steps have now been added to the diorama! :-)
It was actually a bit hard to find a proper door that had both the right size for the miniatures and the diorama, but eventually we ended up with a door from an old Games Workshop tower.

Christmas Diorama Door

Mrs. Clause:

The Dark Sword Miniature has been painted and is now ready to be placed into the Diorama. The second dog will still be a part of the diorama but will be lying next to Mrs. Clause’s friend, and a bunch of packages. She’ll probably be posted as the next update – I’m a bit behind with the updates/pictures, as most of the Diorama is actually finished. I’ll get everything posted asap!

The Fireplace:

Time to reveal the finished Fireplace! As mentioned earlier, the fireplace is this one from Fenryll. It’s quite large, but we felt that it was quite suitable nonetheless. It has some funny small features, such as a couple of mice (The second one can’t be seen on the picture) after a piece of bread. To make it a bit more christmassy we added a “Reindeer” trophy, which of course had to be Rudolph.
Nicki did his best to create a couple of christmas stockings out of greenstuff to hang up, the first attempts were quite horrible, but eventually they ended up pretty good :-D

I did a bit of freehand on the stockings which added a nice touch. Unfortunately I’m not too happy with the Rudolph name plate, in Danish it’s spelled “Rudolf”, which would’ve made it fit much nicer, but as you can see below, we ended up with the english variant! ;-)

Christmas Diorama 2016 - Fireplace

Mrs. Claus’ Friend:

One of the last thing we finished for the diorama is the naugthy friend of Mrs. Claus. The miniature is the 2009 Christmas Sophie, (without her wings!) which is still available from their website. My husband added a ton of extra gifts to the miniature from Ristul’s Market. She ended up taking a pretty long time to paint! But she sure does shine!

Final result of the 2016 Christmas Diorama:

At long last we finished the Diorama 100% and just in time before Christmas/Jul (Which is celebrated December 24th here in Denmark)

Santa’s facial expression perfectly matches the situation and the eye contact between the two girls turned out great! We are very proud of our Diorama!

The Christmas tree was made using an old terrain tree (can’t remember which brand) with glued on glimmer and gems and a small starfish on top (In Denmark we use stars on top of our trees!)

We learned one thing this year though, and that’s the walls. We used a thick plaster on styro and it ended up looking a bit too messy. Next time we will file down the layer and make it much more smooth, especially when using colours on the walls. It looks great in our lighted vitrine however, and will stay there all year (every day is like Christmas in our home!)

This has been our second Christmas Diorama and we plan on making a new one each year! Next year it’s either the Frog Christmas or the Spooky Diorama (with a creepy santa!)