My Neighbor Totoro BUS STOP Diorama // DIY Studio Ghibli Crafts

hi folks my name is adam and i like to make tiny nerdy things and today i'm finally getting my ghibli on with a fan favorite my neighbor totoro as always the very first thing i'm going to start with is the armature because it goes inside so you kind of have to now i'm going to use a slightly thicker gauge wire on this one just because it's going to be a slightly larger scale than i usually do but all the other processes are the exact same i'll start by bulking up the body and then i get started on the head i always choose to do the head first because i'm so crap at actually like measuring things as in i don't measure things and by building the head first i can sort of build the rest of the body off of it now the other reason i'm doing this is because satsuki is a oddly shaped anime girl so you kind of have to start with the head otherwise all the body parts are going to be wonky so i'm going to start by making the face poking a couple little eye holes in and then realize that i made it way too humanoid and i need to make it look kind of like an alien i've also chopped her arms off because they are superfluous at this point and i'm going to add them in later then we can start adding the ears in and once i've got the ears in place the head has been baked and i get started on may now may is the exact same thing only she's a little bit more of a ball and a little bit less of like a alien sort of spiky bearded thing but this little backpack that i'm putting on uh satsuki is mei's body she's just basically a bread loaf with arms and legs however i'm going to take the arms and legs off once i've got satsuki's arms in place once i have baked may's head i put a little hood on her strapped around the body and ignore the fact that it looks kind of like a stretched out peanut at this point there's gonna be an awful lot of positioning and repositioning that you won't actually see you're just gonna kind of see the stages as i move along so i'll try and point out where i fixed it and where i unfixed it because that's going to be a recurring theme throughout this entire build now we're ready to get started on satsuki's actual clothing so we're going to add her collar and little straps and then that adorable little button that fits in the middle of her collar then we get started on her dress which i have purposefully left until now just because i knew there would be a lot of blending to work around so once everything's been baked i can start adding the various limbs on to may so a couple adorable little legs poking out the back and then a teeny tiny hand which will be hanging down her right arm and then i'll make another hand to hang out the left one which is draped down the back of satsuki's uh what is that left arm now again i'm not too concerned about how these look because you won't be able to see them behind the umbrella but if you're gonna do it do it right now the boots are like white uggs for whatever reason i guess they're rain boots but they look like hugs anyways now we are on to the final touches for satsuki which is adding on her hair now i didn't want to add too much texture to it because the idea behind this entire sort of build video diorama thing is that i want to try and keep very much in line with the anime style so we'll see if i can maintain that all the way through or if i start to lean back to washes and sharp edges now for our big sleepy chunky boy uh basically you're gonna get a potatoes worth of aluminium foil and you're gonna turn it into a potato shape then a little bit of masking tape to hold it all in place slap on some clay and your potato has become an egg then to get the totoro body you need to add some tiny little legs on the bottom and then i mean that's kind of that's the gist of it so at this point he's essentially an egg with a face and we could probably call it a day here however i do want to add a tiny bit more detail into it so i'm going to start bulking out the face now this is totoro mark 1. now the shape is perfect but for whatever reason i decided to give it sort of a humanoid nose and the eyeballs are huge and way too close together so it's got it's kind of monkey-esque and looks a little bit like a porg and i don't i don't think that i like it also i've added these ears in um and i'm gonna take them off because he definitely i think i got stuck thinking he's a pork because he doesn't have ears he's got weird little tricone things up top so uh first face gets smashed back in and then i'm gonna try to round out a little bit better of a shape here we're going to go with a little bit less of a monkey look and more towards like a feline cat look but for whatever reason again i thought that i would give it a human nose i haven't quite figured out what's going on with the nose at this point um but i'm going to come back through and fix all that after i think i started fixing it at like midnight so i didn't actually turn the camera on but i will point it out to you so you know what i have done now in the movie his fur is just sort of gray like you can't actually see that it's fur except for those tiny little fur lines all around the edge of it and i could have absolutely gotten away with just giving him like a smooth body and painting gray because that's how a lot of statues seem to be but i didn't want to i wanted to make him look like a proper fluffy spirit of the forest so i've opted instead to go with like a proper furry exterior also i really like painting fur so any opportunity to give like a big fluffy furry body that's what i'm going to go for now i have popped the ears off this point as i had said before apparently i also pulled his eyes out and now he looks like a fluffy demon baby so of course i'm going to fill those eye sockets in immediately and and he kind of looks he kind of looks like sanic at this point or he looks kind of like especially without any of the ears he looks way too monkey asked for what i'm trying to go for here so as i said before i've come back through and fixed his face to something decidedly less monkey-esque and his nose is much smaller and it looks much more feline which i think is the closest to what i'm trying to get with him actually he looks like an otter which i think is a little bit more in tow with what he would be accepting of course that he's a spirit of the forest so he's not anything in particular but i've opted to go sort of the cat route which is why the whiskers work well and of course i made his little leaf to go on top now i also decided he wasn't nearly chunky enough so i've thickened up his belly and i will make a very soft sort of a fur by not going too hard with the texturing and i'm not going to worry about adding those little uv-shaped arrow things on his chest instead i'm going to paint those on afterwards now his arms are my favorite because they're just lumps they're just lumps that are attached to his body so the one on the right will be hanging down and then of course the one on the left is going to be upwards holding an umbrella so i've got to angle that up a little bit and then i'm going to get a little bit of aluminium which will serve as sort of a stand-in umbrella so that i can press the shape into his palm that way i've got sort of a u-shape to hold the umbrella something to glue to when i finish the whole thing now his little thingies are just uh little paw pointy things but i think he's got like an opposable thumb or an opposable claw of sorts because he's got the two in the front are sorry the four in the front and then he's got one in the back when he holds the umbrella and unless my animal anatomy is way off i believe that that would have to be an opposable thumb what the are you talking about at any rate all i need to do is add the tail and then a couple uh pads on the bottom for his toes to go on too and then we're on to painting so obviously he's gonna be gray so i'm gonna go gray all over uh basically it's just a darker gray than what we've got on here but once i start adding that gray on and it separates the color of his belly and his body that's when i start to realize that yes this will actually work out fairly well and he will be obviously totoro now because the gray doesn't paint over super well with any of my really crappy paints i've only got crappy like light colors so i'm going to use just a basic white as a primer and then i'm going to cover it with sort of a slightly off-white this is white and bone white i believe it is mixed together so that you end with just just not quite white and then of course the little arrows that go on his chest are going to be that same gray and i'm just going to paint them on with sort of a thick bit of paint so they stand out a tiny bit against the background and then we're onto the dry brush now this is why i love doing fur because dry brush is so much fun to do over something all righty like this fur so a slightly lighter gray over top to really bring out all the highlights of that fur then his eyes are obviously going to be a very white white and once i've got those painted in a tiny black dot in the middle of them and then using a pin you can't really see it very well but i've added just the smallest tiniest dab of white which will give him sort of that mischievous totoro sparkle then we can paint his nose black and the leaf on top is obviously green and then to give the eyeballs an appropriately eyebally appearance i'm going to use a little uv resin spread over the surface and then blast it with a uv light and then the final touch will be adding black to his whiskers and his paint job is essentially done then we get started on the umbrella this is a nice and easy process to make some really nice looking umbrella handles at least so i'm going to take a little piece of aluminium wire and then i'm going to put a little bit of wire shrink wrap on it so this is like the plastic shrink wrap that you put over the solder pieces of electronics blast it with a heat gun and it'll tighten on it leaves a nice sort of rubbery umbrella e grip to it and it is perfect for this it also means we don't need to paint the bare wire this just goes straight on so once that's finished i can attach it directly onto satsuki and then i'll make another one for totoro and then the only thing we have left to do is make the actual umbrella canopy of course before we do that we need to paint satsuki because it's going to be hard to get in behind the umbrella to get like her back and the little sections that would be hiding under a massive umbrella so we'll go through the usual process the pikachu for the face she's got a bright yellow shirt and an orangish short of uh dress now this took maybe 15 or 16 000 coats to actually get good coverage on it it's just because the paints i'm using are not particularly well pigmented and things like yellow and orange and red don't go over gray super well of course it would have been a lot easier if i had primed everything in a lighter color or even in those lighter shades however hindsight being what it is means that i just opted to do 15 or 1600 coats instead of having to do a single coat of primer now yes i realize i'm painting her hair black here and it is brown so i will go back and fix that worry not then we get started on the face it should be fairly simple all right so this was me trying to draw her face on with one of these acrylic markers but the line was way too thick so i ended up going back through with just some of the skin tone to thin out those lines then to make the umbrella i'm going to use this delightful christmas ornament bobble thing and this wonderful wonderful fabric so i'm going to drape it over the entirety of the bobble and then strap it underneath using some elastic bands and then once i've got a nice tight fit over that then i can apply some thinned out mod podge now when this dries it will become nice and hard and it will retain the shape of the bobble underneath so it'll give me a nice dome as simple as drawing sort of a circle into the center of that and this will give me my layout for where i'm gonna have the umbrella so that when i come back with a pair of scissors i can cut out a nice umbrella-esque shape then to add the tines are they called times is it tines on an umbrella to add the little ribby dealies that go on the inside of the umbrella i'm just gonna use some thinner strips of aluminium wire which i will stick to the center of the bobble using some green stuff and then i can stick the umbrella canopy over top of that then i'll use a little bit of super glue to hold the tines in place actually i use i used a lot of super glue i used way too much super glue and it looks hideous by the end of it but it's the underside so hopefully you won't see it i also cut some straight lines from each of the tines to the other tines to give it sort of a nice bat wing effect i guess we'll call it and then i spray painted them with some gray primer then i can start painting them one is going to be purple and the other is going to be red the purple went on really nicely the red took again about a million coats it took so many coats so many coats and it still ended up being kind of a weak looking red so something to bear in mind prime with lighter colors and you can save yourself a lot of hassle then of course the only thing left to do was paint the little metal parts running up the center and all the tips and then we're ready to glue them onto the end of the umbrella handles so satsuki gets the red one and then i'm going to give a large umbrella handle to totoro now i realize that it's supposed to be black but i thought it would be fun to have it green give it a little bit of color why not right and then the purple one goes on top of that and those two are essentially finished oh so there's still one more character to make and that is the bus stop sign now i had a little piece of dowel and i had a milk carton lid which i glued a little bit of foam onto and i thought that because it's sort of angled i can cut an angle just using some knives and it's probably one of the ugliest things that i have ever made but we can just paint it gray and say it's concrete so to attach the post i'll use just a little dab of hot glue in that beautifully carved out piece of foam and then we can start cutting out the sign itself and then they'll get glued onto that post and i made some tiny little metal uh brackets to hold it all in place and then we can go over the entire thing in a coat of black mod podge a nice metallic purple to cover the sign a concrete to cover up that horrifying base and then just a basic silver through the center then i'm ready to start writing in the timetable so i'm going to use these tiny acrylic markers and then i'm going to copy the kanji as best i could i don't speak japanese or write it so i just kind of copy the pictures and it looks fine then we're on to building the base the first thing you'll need is some white paper some green paint apply the green paint and then apply a bit more green paint and you'll end up with these beautifully patterned paper sheets this is going to be the base for our grass and ferns and little bits of green life in the background so i'm going to cut it into equal size strips and then i'll fold it over itself so that i don't need to cut quite so many pieces out then i'll draw a little leaf shape onto it and then chop out leaves and i'll end up with these four delightful leaves and then i'm going to take the rest of my strips do the exact same things that i end up with a whole bunch of leaves then i'm going to take a couple longer leaves that i've cut and fold them in half and then i'm going to take a pair of scissors and cut all the way up these are going to act as our ferns so these are sort of the little weird things that stick out the side of the ferns so once you unfold it and roll it around you're left with the delightful little fern leaf so add that to the pile so then our final count is a bunch of tiny leaves some long stringy grass leaves some standard leaves and some fern leaves then i'll glue all the fern leaves onto a piece of paper so that i can roll that piece of paper up and i'm left with a adorable as heck little fern plant so all you got to do is glue that together and you do the same thing to the grass and then you can curve the the blades out and you've got some wonderful little grassy ferny bits then i'll glue the remaining leaves onto some floral wire to have a nice green stem bunch them into groups and then twist all the wires together so that they are in sort of a planty bundle then i'm going to take those bundles and reshape the leaves by sort of squeezing and crushing and twisting until i'm happy with the shape they're in then we're on the actual ground so to set the base in place i'm going to use a little bit of plaster of paris and then that gets slopped on and you spread it about like you're making some sort of cursed cake it's really fun i really like doing this you absolutely don't need to use it i actually covered all of this up with sort of a mud texture i like doing it it's funny it adds unnecessary weight to it and it makes it feel expensive now the road of the bus stop is basically a muddy surface so we're gonna try making our own mud now i've never tried this before but i'm optimistic so i'm gonna take some of that modeling paste i love so much a little brown paint a little black paint to mix it up and then to give it a little bit of texture just some bog standard sand then you're going to want to make sure that you find somebody else's brush to use because it's going to ruin whatever you use so if you have like a surplus of makeup brushes in the bathroom go ahead and take one of those they work really well for this sort of thing and you can usually throw one or two of these brushes away before anybody notices so once i've got a nice layer of the mud down i'm going to add a little bit of flock to the back of it just to sort of delineate where i'm going to be putting my grass and greenery a little bit of flock over top of that just to thicken it up a tiny bit and then i can start adding in all those little plants and then just using some tweezers i'm going to poke some of the much greener brighter grass in amongst all the plant life the reason for this is that the flock and the grass that i put on before it was kind of nasty green like a realistic green and it didn't quite fit the whole motif so i want to lay some lighter grass down now to hold it all in place a nice thick coat of ice probably alcohol and then liberally apply some thinned out pva glue to really tie it all in place then we're ready to add the big chunky boy so he's gonna get popped in where we left that gap for his tail then we can put our tiny heroines into the spot beside him and of course the uh the most important character the bus stop sign and then using a little bit of that leftover mud i'm going to blend some of those harsh seams and also put a little bit of mud on each of their boots because they're standing in mud they would have muddy boots then we're on to making the rain now this is this is one of those things that i thought would be an easy simple process and it's also the last thing i had to do so i really i really uh really biffed it on this one to be entirely honest with you i mean i think it turns out terrific but the amount of effort required to really make it stand out is is beyond my patience and simply beyond the amount of time i had in order to finish this video basically i'm coating the entire thing in a fairly thick polyurethane to give it a nice watery look so everything looks damp and then i'm going to make a couple little puddles of uv resin so i'm just kind of placing them out wherever i think that they would look nice and then blasting them again with my black light so the idea here was to make little rain droplets falling into these puddles so i'm going to take a little bit of uv resin on my ball stylus and draw tiny circles which will be the ripples where that water drops and as long as you work fast and hit it with the uv light before it hardens up you can actually get a nice sort of circular water droplet effect a ripple if you will then i'm going to crack out this stuff right here which is fiberglass cloth basically it is fiberglass woven super tight but if you pull out each of these individual tiny tiny strands you've got a nice strong piece of sort of spider silk that is really hard to break and is invisible then i'm going to take a little bit more uv resin and then drag the fiberglass through that and while it's beading up i'm going to blast it with that uv light again and once it's hardened you'll get these delightful little beads on a basically invisible string then you can use a little bit more uv resin to lock them in place in the center of our little water droplets and you've got rain basically now i'm gonna call this one a success with a caveat now the caveat is that while this works really really well it's a project in and of itself so it's not really the kind of thing you do at 10 a.m the day before you plan to release your video because just this amount of rain took me four or five hours and the idea was to coat everything in sort of raindrops but i lack the time and patience to do that properly so i think what you would need to do is you build your diorama and then come back a month later and do all the water droplets as a separate project however with that finished i think we're done and it's time to go to those glamour shots [Music] do well i'm not sure how i feel about this one and i don't think a return to the world of ghibli is completely off the table just yet hell maybe even a rerun of our favorite forest dwelling big boys in the works and hey if you think that kind of thing might just pique your interest consider subscribing to my patreon so you can see what's happening behind the scenes plus you'll get a chance to hang out with some pretty lovely people like madison taylor maddie saucy wizards beard co and abel janos just to name a few otherwise let me know in the comments below what you think uh which of the totoro designs you like the best and what you want to see next until then though cheers [Music] you

Channel: North of the Border

Views: 336,043

Keywords: my neighbor totoro, my neighbour totoro, studio ghibli, diy crafts, resin rain, my neighbour totoro bus stop scene, bus stop scene diorama, how to sculpt totoro, how to sculpt satsuki, how to sculpt mei, sculpting anime figures, polymer clay tutorial, real rain diorama, resin diorama, diy studio ghibli crafts, ghibli papercraft, make studio ghibli diorama, how to make studio ghibli diorama, how to craft, crafts diy, miniatures diy, paper craft, papercraft, hayao miyazaki

Id: 3Eq5mD1jbgg

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021