Preface: The model in this post was completed late last year. However, I thought I'd go back through some of my old builds to write posts about them.
I was browsing around Barnes and Nobel lusting after all the Bandai kits they carry. What I really wanted was the Voltron kit, but it was hard to justify the $70 spend with the misses looking over my shoulder. Instead, I decide to buy a tiny Gunpla kit. I am not at all familiar with Gunpla, but the Haro kit was under $10, and I was desperate to put something together.
Haro is a happy, spherical robot painted in circus colors and affixed with a permanent smile. It was far too merry of a mechanical being for my taste. It needed to be introduced to the hardships of life. I have always wanted to try and tell a story with a diorama that was limited to a very small area (e.g. 6 inches squared). I also wanted that concept of the story to be convey by a single word: abandoned. With that idea in mind, I started sketching:
I was browsing around Barnes and Nobel lusting after all the Bandai kits they carry. What I really wanted was the Voltron kit, but it was hard to justify the $70 spend with the misses looking over my shoulder. Instead, I decide to buy a tiny Gunpla kit. I am not at all familiar with Gunpla, but the Haro kit was under $10, and I was desperate to put something together.
Haro is a happy, spherical robot painted in circus colors and affixed with a permanent smile. It was far too merry of a mechanical being for my taste. It needed to be introduced to the hardships of life. I have always wanted to try and tell a story with a diorama that was limited to a very small area (e.g. 6 inches squared). I also wanted that concept of the story to be convey by a single word: abandoned. With that idea in mind, I started sketching:
This was the first time I worked with Sculptamold. I wanted to make a crater and add some surface texturing to a square of wood. It's really fun stuff, but I ended up having to remake it after a first try. For the first go, I used a square of end-joined pine that warped terribly from all the moisture from the curing Sculptamold. The second try was done with done with plywood which resists warping since each ply has the grain of wood going in different directions. When one layer wants to swell and distort along the length of its grain, the other layers can prevent the movement.
After a coat of earth-toned paint acrylic paint, I added some Modpodge and sprinkled on sifted dirt from outside my house. A very weathered and chipped Haro was added to the scene with glue. Finally, I added some black- and light-colored pigment streaks to the ground to mimic scorch marks.
This delightful little droid met a bad end and was eventually forgotten by those who sent it. It was a memorable build. Someday soon I plan to tell another story on a 6x6 inch plank.
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