Progress

I painted the inside of the bank and the bottom of the river. I used browns such as Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna and other colors you use to paint model horses. Dry brushing seems to be a pretty popular way to paint rocks, but instead, I just watered down the paints and blended them together.  Then I used black to base coat everything on the bottom since I’m using sand to cover it.

A River Runs Through It Diorama

First off this post has nothing to do with A River Runs Through It, but it seemed like a catchy title.  

Dioramas/scenes are great props to performance showing. I’ve seen plenty of cool ones featuring some type of water in it. 

For a long time I’ve only admired them, wondering how I could ever figure out how to make one with one. After researching references and reading through how-tos by numerous authors, I decided to give it a try. You can only get better, right?  So this will be a total trial and error project that I’m hoping will be more positive than a failure. 🙂

I gathered supplies.  
I used poster board to be the base. I wanted to make it showable sized, which meant I need to be well within the limits of the qualifications. During Christmas, Michaels had a sale on snow diorama bases, so I bought a pack. Really it’s just foam pieces. I drew out the outline of where I wanted the river to be. 
I hacked up the foam pieces to fit within where I wanted them to go. 
I covered the open hole with plaster sheets. 
Then modeling paste was used to create ridges and a ‘banky’ look to the side so it wasn’t straight. I’ve used modeling paste to give models a furry coat, so I thought it would be interesting to try sculpting the bank’s ridges with it and I’m happy I did. I wanted erosion from water to show. Plus ridges make it more realistic looking. 
Using some foam pieces, I also ripped, tore, and sanded pieces down to have more of a appearance of rocks. 

I glued them down, and coated modge podge onto it as filler and to cement everything together. I have no idea if modge podge is filler, but it seemed like a good idea at the time! The gel medium will be used to make a current/waterfall going over the rocks. 
Well, the next part is painting!

How To Make a Basic Zombie Doll

To make a zombie doll there are a couple of things you need to do. This how-to will be only for making a basic zombie doll. I will do one on making a hard one later (With sculpting and such)
First here are the supplies I use

  • Doll
  • modeling paste
  • Pastels
  • Acrylic Paint
  • Makeup of some sort ( I use Halloween)
  • Reference pic

Your zombie reference is very important right now. There are so many different ways that you can do this, so having a reference will help with any shading (just like painting horses, right?) and general ideas of what you want.

I started with a stripped doll. You don’t want to get your doll’s clothes dirty.

Then I took out my heat gun and heated the face up. The face looked very ‘normal’ so I wanted to make the eyes look shadowed and deep in the doll’s face.

Once it was heated up I stuck the end of a paintbrush where the doll’s eye socket would be and twirled it around until I had the eyes deep enough and wide enough.

Beautiful? Just like when customizing horses, the doll will go through an ugly phase before it gets better.

Then I grabbed my modeling paste,

And dabbed it onto the doll’s face. I wanted the zombie to have uneven skin and some wounds.

I put a layer of Fawn Acrylic paint onto the doll’s face and neck. Doing it in multiple light coats is best.

I broke out pastels,

 and gave a layer of light grey onto the doll’s face, focusing along on the hollow eye sockets.

Next I used purple pastel and further placed pastel into the eyes, trying to go for a sick look and make the eyes look even more hallow. I also put some on the mouth area, and some red pastel where I wanted some wounds to be.

This part I used my halloween makeup for. It is thicker than paint, and wettish-but not runny. It’s more of a paste. Anyways, I put that on the nose and into the eye socket.
I put some of the yellow halloween makeup and placed it here and there on the doll’s face. I also put some black into the eye socket.

Blend. I blended the colors together until I got the contrast that I wanted. So here, you can take some liberty (not that you can’t for the whole thing.)

Using some black halloween makeup, you want the face to look haggard, so I put it in the upper part of the head and along the side of the of the nose.

Blend it, and then add color to the lips. Keep playing with the colors until you are happy with how it is.
I did the same with some of the body.

Grabbed my blood gel.

And added it to the wounds on the face.

Done.
The eyes. You can make them completely white, or you can blue, or red. The sky’s the only limit with this. I made mine white and then put the pupil and iris area in as a goldish color.

Done!
PS.
If you make a doll using this how-to, I’d love to see pictures of it. Send me pics of it at breyerhorselover11@gmail.com and I will do a post showing them off. 🙂