In Progress » Dagobah Diorama » Seeing the Forest for the Trees

After my last update I painted the entire wood base in a bright purple exterior paint then a light coating of Krylon Fusion textured spraypaint. Why would I do this? Well the exterior paint was leftover from painting my daughters deck chair which I had stripped of it’s old chipped paint and well… that’s another story. The paint is good enough for outdoor wood so it’s good enough to seal the MDF from the warping moisture of the celluclay. The texture paint helps give the surface tooth in order to hold the celluclay in place on the base. Yoda’s hut was also primed and the interior was painted in “trail tan” acrylic paint before I seal it to the base. Also shown is a pic of the 4 sheets of unfinished thick basswood I’ll be using for the side-walls of the base.

Today I made three more trees, but not before noticing a potential problem with this layout. Nothing visual as I think it’s going to look great in the end, but the issue lies with the density of the forest and the ability to paint the undersides of the trees. See getting a brush, let alone an airbrush ro spray under the trees and many future roots and vines will be very difficult. So for the first 2 trees which are already mounted in place, I’ve brush-painted their undersides with thin very dark-brown acrylics. For the three new trees and the 7 more I’ve yet to do I’ll need to attach most of the roots and vines and paint most of each tree (except their mounting points) before mounting them to the base.

Not a huge problem, but I’m glad that I discovered it now BEFORE mounting more trees.  Especially with todays progress where the additional main support roots of the trees intertwine, overlap, wind around, etc… Creates a very cool look!

Tomorrow after the celluclay dries I’ll add additional celluclay to the un-covered roots and make the rest of the branches that extend from the main trunk. Each tree will only have one or two additional limbs. These are tall trees so for the most part the limbs would be further up the trunks as depicted in my refs. Then perhaps I’ll be able to add the first of the wire roots and vines. After that add more texture with modeling paste, spray-paint them in black to prime, then airbrush them a dark tree brown/gray before drybrushing to bring out the detail.