A user sent me a great suggestion along with some pics for a diorama that he made. And his resourcefulness is a perfect example of what I try to show you when it comes to diorama making: Be creative! There is no best way to make dioramas. There are just lots of different ways and you can find great tools, techniques and materials for your dioramas. Just look around and try different things!

When making the terrain shell of my dioramas I use either Hydrocal or Plaster of Paris. You can also use Paper Mache but you have to be careful with it because it is sensitive to water. A visitor to this site tried his hand at making a diorama and he didn't have any of these things so he tried mixing some spackling paste with water so it had a nice consistency! Voila! His shell came out perfect!!! Very nice. And I have to say that it looks like a professionally tended golf course. It's that green and that nice :)

SO the real lesson here is that it is perfectly fine to try creative alternatives. After all if you want to make a minature world you are going to have to improvise a lot of different things.

This idea thought up and submitted by a web visitor J. Yentzer - Thanks J. !

Here are some pictures

Make mountains out of craft paper! Yup, you would be surprised how easy it is to make terrain with thick paper. This tutorial was submitted by a web visitor (Frank) and my thanks go to him for the great tip.

Using Volcanic Rock in a battlefield diorama I love using commonly found materials to make a diorama. Here is more of a look at the volcanic rock in the Iwo Jima diorama.