Just when you thought it was safe...

So, you thought there were no more dioramas!  Not so!

This piece was part of the 2004: the Year of Dioramas.

This giant tower was made entirely from sculpey.  It is hollow on the inside, but it still weighs several pounds.

It had to be baked in multiple parts.  I made the bottom section first, and baked that.  I extended the tower section upwards and baked it again.

The two sentry posts on top had to be sculpted separately and baked, since it was going to be too tall for the oven!

Once those were baked and cooled, I glued them onto the tower.  The windows were tricky, as I had to sculpt those as well.  I wish I had made some casts of those!  They would have come in very handy since then...

All of the stone textures you see were carved on once it had been baked.  That is a very time consuming and difficult process, but it is well worth it.  Unlike some of my other non sculpey techniques for creating those textures, this one lets me get a great deal of precision and depth.

First, it lets me create the variety of surfaces, such as the flagstones on the roof, the wall stones, the corner stones, and even the wood grain on the door and the barrel, which was also made from sculpey.

The rock texture on the base was created by pressing real rocks into the unbaked sculpey.  That is a fantastic technique that Cathy invented.  It has come in very handy, even recently when she made her steampunk bases for DragonForge.

I have a lot of pics of the painted versions of this, so stay tuned!!!