I Made Fantasy Dioramas inside RESIN Blocks!

martina here and today we're gonna make the tiniest landscapes i have ever done usually i work on a medium scale like with the castle i did or the tower fountain but today i want to challenge myself and go super small and really just get into those nitty-gritty details and to make it even cooler we're gonna encase it all in some beautiful resin cubes so i've made two concepts that i want to try to recreate one is of this cozy watermelon next to a river with some smoke in the chimney and light in the fireplace the other is of this overgrown statue in the middle of the forest taken over by nature where no one has been for centuries and now to avoid disaster like with the underwater painting we're gonna do a test pour of epoxy in here so i'm just gonna drop a bunch of materials i'm planning to use like some cardboard some styrofoam some foliage and we'll glue it in place in here and now we can do the test port and see if the epoxy will act nicely together with all these weird materials i know it's a masterpiece it looks beautiful i think i managed to pop most of the bubbles so i'm just going to move this to the other room to cure and then we can get started on these dioramas so i think i want to start with a cozy scene and for that we're going gonna need a watermill wheel as well as a house like how do we go about actually making those things i think the most accessible way of doing this is really just to make a 2d template first that i can cut out with some scissors or you know since i'm lazy use the laser cutter i've made a couple of patterns like this in the past and it usually goes something like this first i'll make a super basic paper template of the shape i want just to find the relative measurements between all the different parts so that way i can make a little house i think looks nice and then i can go back with a ruler and just measure like how long is this wall compared to that one and so on and so forth and then i go into photoshop make an a4 size document because you know standard printer paper size and start making all those shapes the walls the windows the floors roofs doors everything at this point we have some pretty good looking templates and now i can just bring those into inkscape and turn them into laser cutting patterns and now i'm left with this template that i can use for eternity i can scale it up or down i can print it and cut it with a box knife or use a laser cutter i think that's pretty awesome now i'm just gonna scale this down a bit because it's a lot larger than i'm thinking and we can get started making this house [Music] so [Music] do you see how cute this is look at the shingles so smooth it's adorable there's still a couple of small things left we're going to add some detail using these wooden matchsticks and some tiny dowels and i'm also going to use this like overhead sheet inside the windows to make it look like glass let's finish the house [Music] okay so i'm done assembling the house and in the meantime i've been working on doing some 3d prints down here in the basement i didn't film it because well look at these things they're so smooth so you wouldn't be able to see anything happening on the 3d printer and also our basement is currently a mess so yeah i'm just going to bring these upstairs so we can clean these up and we can go prime them and paint them [Music] finished priming and now this just has to dry in the meantime i'm gonna go ahead and paint this house [Music] [Music] so [Music] i'm super happy with how this cobblestone texture turned out i haven't actually painted cobblestone on this scale before and i think it turned out really cute this is kind of looks so good in the landscape and talking about the landscape i cut this square out to act as the base for everything so i'm gonna find out now like where i want to place the house and then i'm gonna use some polymer clay so we can start making the landscape here and once the landscape is made we're gonna paint all the tiny little miniatures terraforming time let's go [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] i just put the epoxy river here and i also just finished painting all these little miniatures and oh my god they are adorable before we can continue with this we have to wait for the epoxy river to cure so i'm just gonna put all of this to the side and in the meantime we're gonna start working on the other diorama the centerpiece on the other diorama is going to be this statue and i found this super cool model of this woman with huge wings it's just it's perfect for this so i 3d printed it and i just have to take this apart glue it together and then try to paint it to look like stone so now let's first of all remove these supports there we go look at this oh it's so cool i have this little applicator that is filled with uv resin and i have this uv torch so i can just use the applicator to put on a little dab of whatever where i need it and then use uv torch to cure it it's really handy just dab some resin on there and it's gonna cure in like a matter of seconds next wing dab it on and it's stuck oh this is so pretty seriously this model gorgeous we got it all cleaned up so now we can bring it outside to prime it and try to paint it like stone [Music] paint job is done and i think it looks really really cool so now i'm going to use some air drying clay and start making the landscape and try to integrate these into the landscape [Music] i just put the other diorama again to the side because the epoxy is now well it's not properly cured but it's almost there we're gonna try a new technique to try to make some believable waves the idea is you just grab like a cotton swab like this pull these tiny little pieces of cotton from the inside you grab some mod podge gloss start applying it to all the places where you want those big waves [Music] there we go we won't actually be able to see what this will really look like until all the mod podge is completely dry in the meantime i'm just going to start painting the remaining landscape here and we can start putting on some flowers and some grass and just make this look nice [Music] [Music] [Music] so we have finally managed to mount everything on the diorama and oh my god it's looking so cute and as you can see i've already put it inside the casting mold and there are some cables sticking out here from the lights inside and i've just sealed off this hole with some hot glue and i've also used some mold release on the inside here so this should be easy to remove later but now let's have a look at the test we did earlier this video there are a lot of very tiny bubbles here and that's just because i didn't use either the vacuum chamber or a pressure chamber and i'm planning to use a pressure chamber for this and just leave it in there while it's curing so i don't think that's gonna be an issue and also there has been some color bleeding from some of the materials here but i just made sure not to use any of those so i think we're gonna have a successful pour here but that does not mean i'm not terrified i'm just gonna quickly go mix some epoxy and we can do this pour we got the mixed epoxy here and i'm just going to pour really really slowly to let the boxes into all the little nooks and crannies please let this epoxy gods please be with me [Music] [Applause] and now we pressurize [Music] while we're waiting for that to cure we're gonna continue working on the other diorama we can paint it and start applying some vegetation let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] second diorama is now finished it's ready for the epoxy pour all we got to do now is just pour the epoxy cross our fingers and wait so since the epoxy has to cure for a while i want to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about world anvil so if you're a storyteller or a world builder of any kind i really encourage you to listen up because world animal is just an amazing tool for anyone who wants to create their own world like writers artists game masters game developers world players doesn't matter this tool's for you world animal makes it possible to create a full-fledged wiki of your world you can create detailed timelines extensive family trees overviews of family house relations or city relations and it's just a bonus that everything looks amazing you can also make interactive maps of your world and cities where you can for example create trade routes and write articles in cities and you can of course write articles on just about any topic you can think of to fit your world and if you're in the writer's block they have this really cool feature called world building prompts where you're given a topic to write about so you can keep expanding your world now the incredible part is world animal has a free version with all the basic features so you can get started creating your own world today at no cost but if you love it as much as we do then make sure to use the code nerdforge to save 20 off the premium memberships so make sure to check them out using the link down below and back to the project okay so it's been a couple of days now and these two should be completely cured i'm so nervous please be good i don't know what to do if this is bad oh it's clear oh at least it looks like it oh it's beautiful it has crawled in on itself a little bit but oh my god it's so clear there are no bubbles baby oh my god let's take them upstairs so we can get these molds off [Music] look how shiny oh okay i just quickly soldered the leds to these battery holders on the bottom here so now they are separate units that we can put anywhere we don't even need cables oh but yeah it feels really good to be finished with this project i thought it would take a lot less time because i mean they're so small right just because they're smaller doesn't mean it's faster there's two things i would like to improve on this for next time i wouldn't use pva glue or mod podge to seal things like the water and the grass somehow it reacted a bit with the epoxy and it looks kind of like spider-webby a little ghost-like it's a kind of cool effect but it wasn't really what i was going for here so i think instead for next time i use uh epoxy glue and super glue the other thing is i think we have to find a new brand of epoxy because even though the one we used is rated for really deep pores like up to 12 centimeters every time we've used it we've had this weird surface on top it just it doesn't get even and so we kind of had to fix that this time by just pouring another layer on top to get that straight edge but despite all that i think this is definitely the cutest project we've ever done and i'm absolutely in love with how these turned out they're adorable and there's just something about that cube shape that is just now thank you so much for following along on this journey all the way till the end and also a huge thanks to our patrons for continuing to support us i mean you guys are all awesome now it's time let's have a look at the final result [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Nerdforge

Views: 584,751

Rating: 4.9771376 out of 5

Keywords: epoxy resin, resin art, epoxy art, resin diorama, epoxy resin diorama, epoxy diorama, cube world, resin cube, cube diorama, how to make a diorama, miniature world, miniatures, mini landscape, tiny landscape

Id: LsHM3KTca7c

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SoulOfGwyn]

Very nice. I liked the build aswell.