Cardboard City
After seeing Empire’s Rot Gut Station diorama, I was completely blown away and inspired. I have no woodworking skills and little time, so I figured I’d try my hand at a poor man’s version of an action figure city/diorama. My approach: modular cardboard streets.
These are made of scrap cardboard and glue with some masking tape. The idea is that they can be reconfigured in a million different ways to create different backgrounds and environments. They are great for play (my oldest has been playing with the non-stop for the past week and a half), and they are insanely fast and easy builds (it takes about an hour or two for each section, since all I’m doing is sawing cardboard with a steak knife and gluing it all together with carpenter glue).
These are only a few angles I took…I’ll probably take ma few more, since I didn’t get one of the streets lined up in a row to get a long, straight street with great depth of field possibilities.
I tried to make the design work with both 4” and 6” figures to give the play and diorama photo options more flexibility. I wanted to create something that could work for multiple toy lines (like Empire’s playset)…it could be Cyberton, a spaceport city from Star Wars, or it could also work with various toy cars. I chose to spray it with a mixture of darker colors and silver overspray, though there is one building that has a blue side and a pink side to add variety to the background for photos.
Its quick, cheap, and dirty, but man is it a hit in the playroom. The neat thing is that, by doing this, I can see how this type of thing can be improved or adapted, I could create some accessories to liven up the scenes, or I could knock out a few more buildings from cardboard because of how quick and easy they are to make. Lots of fun…
Let me know what you think and thanks for looking.
