I’d been thinking for a while about the elements I might pull together to create my latest diorama. I decided that, given how the scene would be in a semi-rural setting, it might be good to feature a barn in it. I could have purchased a barn kit online, but concluded that I’d construct a building from scratch, something that would be a lot more enjoyable.

After working out the dimensions for a 1/35 scale building I collected the materials I needed to execute the design. These were pretty simple: wooden popsicle sticks and thin cardboard. I split the popsicle sticks into “boards” of fairly uniform height and width. I didn’t worry about constructing a perfect building – after all, it was a barn!

You can see the result in the photo above. I used an acrylic wash to color the walls, and glued appropriate posters (more later about their significance) made from images found on the Internet, re-sized appropriately, to the walls. Again, I didn’t attempt to make the cardboard roof shingles a very uniform size. I glued a cardboard base onto the building rafters, then sketched freehand and cut out rows of cardboard shingles. These were glued onto the base, in a somewhat haphazard manner. There are some loosened individual shingles, as befits an old barn. The roof was colored with a greenish acrylic wash, reminiscent of mold that might accumulate on it over the decades.

This shot of the building’s interior does a good job of illustrating its construction. The wall planks were glued to pieces of paper. I took more care to align the tops of the planks but that was less of a concern when it came to their bottoms. These will be hidden by the diorama’s “ground.” Evident are the vertical braces I put in place to support the roof, and the horizontal ones meant to maintain the barn’s rectangular shape.

I had a lot of fun conceptualizing, constructing, and decorating this important element in the diorama. What do you think of it?