Hello again!

My son and I have started another father-son project... this time a diorama with a rock face/cliff and maybe a tree or two.

As before, I'll be posting our progress with this thread.

Note: For our previous diorama how-to, which was the ranger station, please see this thread: http://www.joedios.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2086. Thanks again for all your comments on that past project. Was fun!

Now keep in mind that what you see in the rest of this thread - I have never done anything remotely crafty/hobbish like this before, so feel free to critique, cause I'm gonna make some mistakes... but that's all part of learning right?


Let's Start with a Tree Experiment

Firstly, we took a used paper towel roll and added some bits of bended cereal-box cardboard to the end, to make the tree seem like it gets wider at the bottom. The main thing I'm after here is to make sure that the tree does NOT look uniform in shape at all... Nature isn't after all ;-)



Using some air-dry modeling clay (this particular clay isn't clay at all, it's actually made from volcanic ash and apparently it's non-toxic) we apply the clay to the paper towel roll, starting at the bottom and working our way up... smoothing and blending as we go.



I taped over the top of the roll and then covered it all in clay as well. Here's a picture of the clay application process finished. Took about 10 minutes.



So we let it sit for 10 more minutes and then I took a sharp paring knife and gently curved lines in the clay, to make the bark look natural. I made some sweeping lines, vertical lines... and I stopped and started in different areas... basically just being totally random. I would like to note, that you should use a very sharp knife for this part, a dull knife we tried left miniscule clumps of clay along the lines, which looked bad.



So there you have it! We have started project number 2! Stay tuned for more updates and photos as we progress.

Cheers! ~ Paul.