This is a tutorial on how to make a great looking miniature treasure chest out of foam.

I have another tutorial showing how to carve one out of two part epoxy. That is a kind of clay that hardens in a couple of hours. That tutorial is here

I used a foam product called Foamular. You can buy it at the home depot. But there are lots of different types of foams you can use. Just be sure to test cut and shape a piece for starting on your treasure chest.

This is two pieces of foam, one for the body of the chest and one for the lid. You can also see that I cut various small pieces of balsa wood to make the iron banding and the lock mechanism.

Your treasure could have sharp and square edges like planks of wood or you could sand it out and smooth the corners. I think this looks better. It is more realistic. And all you need to do is use some sandpaper to round off all the edges and corners.

Once the chest is pretty much shaped and the top/bottom are glued together you can carve out some fun treasure right into the foam. I just dug out lots of divets to make it look like coins and treasure. Looks great after it is painted.

Now we start painting it. The outside of the chest is painted brown with a bit of a different brown on the metal banding. The inside of the chest, where the treasure is, is painted black and gray. This gives us a good base of color to build on.

Next we paint in some gold paint. The treasure chest would look great just like this but we are going to add a whole lot of jewels.

You can get all kinds of inexpensive jewels at any arts and crafts store. I have a big assortment of them.

You can also make up some other things to go in the chest. This is a magic wand. I simply hot glued a big jewel to the end of a piece of dowel. Then after this picture I painted the wand.

And this is a golden chalice that I am making. I just used a toothpick and some small half globe pieces of wood that I had as scraps. Once it was built I then painted it gold.

Here is a look at the completed treasure chest with all its jewels and accessories. It has been placed in the movie set.

And this picture shows the treasure chest in the corner of the temple. This is part of a stop motion animation project. You can see a few different minaitres here including the stained glass windows. I have more about the making of this temple right here: The Dragon's Temple stop motion animation

Tutorial: How to Cast Miniatures - This is a nice tutorial on how to duplicate miniatures. In the first tutorial I show you exactly how to make a copy of a small and not too complex original like this treasure chest. Casting Miniatures is a lot of fun and not hard at all. How to Cast Miniatures I cast two different treasure chests.

How to Sculpt a miniature treasure chest. A treasure chest is a great first project to learn how to sculpt because it is very easy. You can get a good feel for the modelling putty. In this tutorial I sculpt three different chests and show you some techniques. I also use these chests as part of a Casting Miniatures tutorial. How to Sculpt a Miniature Treasure Chest

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