Dioramas With Cars Is A Fun Part II

 

First things first was planning on what to do, at a budget of course. I wanted to make a small garage that could fit two cars, by using slabs of rectangular wood (4 of them) and gluing them together, I got the basics of what it looks like (or at least in my imagination). there’s no roof or a garage door because I don’t know how to make/buy such things yet. To make the garage look more like a proper structure, I painted the walls in white and the floor in a cement gray colour, complete with drawn in cracks with a pen, paint splash and some holes I managed to carve out using a sharp knife. Black was chosen for the exterior to match what most model makers do to single dioramas, check them out on YouTube. Take a look at the photos below.

 

One thing I forgot to mention (and take photos) was the car process, the car I bought was a cheap RMZ City die-cast Camaro, it was originally metallic black with a white stripe. I took the car a part, removed the paint, all the glass and trim out. I planned the car to be some sort of faded yellow, though that didn’t work as well, so I re-sprayed it to matte black. Due to my inexperience with spraying stuff, the paint looked shoddy, which was perfect! Because I wanted it to look like a ratty car, the next step was dry painting (using cheap Buncho paint, very hard) rust, dirt and body rot along places that would normally have such things on an old car. I used chrome markers on the seats and mirrors and added dirt marks, carpets and other junk into the interior to make it look realistic (you can kind of see it in the full finished photos). One interesting thing I made was the angle of the car’s front wheels, that was achieved by removing the plastic underside, the gears and motors for the pullback mechanism to reveal the axles. By literally smashing the front axle with a hammer to bend it, I made it look as it was parked with the wheel turned. Additional details I added were damaged wheels and sanded tyres to make it look bald. 

 

The next step was really adding, painting and weathering the whole diorama are to my liking. Online shops sell miniature garage apparatuses such as drums, car lifts, oil cans and many more at various scales, but they are quite expensive. More specific parts such as an air compressor can cost even more, the one I got was 3d printed and bare, it was up to me to paint it any colour I want. This was the only pre-made garage item I bought, while the rest was simply painted wooden blocks and cylinders. The blocks were painted brown and had lines drawn to mimic old boxes, while cylinder blocks were painted to look like oil drums. 

 

Other details include a shovel, made with a cutout of a paper and glued to a thin stick (match wood), random posters that were scaled down to size, cut and glued to the wall with some weathering, a garage light with wire leading to the switch, bits and pieces of another car (1919 Chevrolet), and a sprinkle of some dirt and tiny pebbles.

 

The hardest DIYed made thing for this project was the car jack, unfortunately I did not take any photos of this. The completed photos now are from my old gallery as the project is currently under repair because a friend of mine accidentally pulled a wall down, though nothing major has changed apart from slightly updated rust painting. Making that garage style jack require extreme patience, hand coordination and good glue control, all of which I did not have, instead, I used, swearing, impatience and extremely sticky fingers from previous glue to glue three pieces of thin match wood, and a small circle to mimic the jacking point.

At it’s done! The project took me over three weeks, as I wasn’t consistently working on it, one last item I added was a car cover made out of tissue, painted dark gray and torn a bit. 

 

This is one of my most proud diorama projects, as a beginner, seeing this done and on my display case really did put a smile on my face. Hobbies like this takes time and if you have a knack for attention to detail, you can make a super cool garage diorama, or any kind that involves cars.

 

Enjoy the photos below and let me know in the comments of you have any questions or what you think of it!

 

I've also removed the Confederate Flag due to recent controversy surrounding it, though my intentions were to contextualize the diorama as being a barnfind in the deep Southern United States, not of anything sensitive in matter.

 

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