Dad's Army 4 - Diorama 1

Just a quick update with some dodgy photos this week, as I'm spending all my time on the diorama. I wouldn't mind so much if I was making progress, but it's slow going.

The first picture is the cardboard mock-up I put together, to get an idea of what the size of the model would look like, and to see if it would be okay with all the figures in it, or if it would be too small/large.

The rough positioning of the figures below was taken before I started painting anything. It's still largely what I'm planning to use, although Pike and Fraser won't be on the stage (I'm not building the stage)

The current plasticard layout, complete with test figures, is shown below. Nothing's glued yet, so I have plenty of time to move things about if required. The positioning of the back windows will be changing, hopefully sometime this week. The layout is populated with some Foundry Assyrians and Victorian hunters because a) I had them handy and b) they're the same size as the diorama figures.

After a week, all I have to show for my time is:

• the wall sections. The back wall required trimming, after I realised that I had to have the walls on top of the floor piece, rather than around the edge (the office door would have been dangling in mid-air if the walls were outside the floor)
• the floor. This involved scribing 72 lines, each one 3mm apart. Each line took 10 shallow cuts, giving a total of 720 cuts. This took a full evening (I know you can get plasticard with these cuts; the problem is that the card isn't wide enough, and the cuts are the full length of the card, while I need them the full width)
• outline of the left wall in InkScape. I obsessed over this to a worrying degree, trying to get every measurement perfect. The thing that tripped me up was that moving something 1mm looks huge when you're working at 300x magnification. However, when applied to the model, it's barely noticeable. I'm going to try and relax when doing future pieces
• downloaded pictures of the posters that I'll need from a website. I haven't found portraits of the King and Queen yet, but I'm looking

The edges of the pieces aren't completely flat, due to the nature of working with plasticard (that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it). I have sanded them down, but there's still a slight slope. It's not obvious when you look at it, but it will cause problems when I come to glue the pieces together. My plan to work around any problems caused by this gap is twofold:

• use 4mm square rod to provide a surface for joining floor to wall and wall to wall
• pin the walls to the floor for extra support. Pinning will involve drilling 0.5mm holes through the base and into the wall, then pinning with plasticard rod. It won't provide much strength, but should be enough to help keep the walls straight

Next week I will get to grips with the left wall and ideally get it finished. The door will be tricky, and there's a radiator to think about, but hopefully I'll start to see some progress.

If worst comes to worst, I can always just mount the figures on the floor, but I'm still hopeful that I'll get the model finished in time.