Diorama of the Chasosaurus Wreck

A boy can add a lot of love to his nature collection in the diorama. There are no hard and fast rules; you can either illustrate a habitat or create one from imagination. It’s an exercise in scale and spatial relationships, an adventure in resourcefulness. Dioramas are crafted with precision and care, even with the smallest of hands at work, and will adorn a nature study or bookshelf with charm and creativity.

Chas and I set to work making one of these yesterday, while Ford was at school. If there was one major criteria in Chas’ mind, it was that the diorama be prehistoric. He has a collection of dinosaurs and when it came down to it, none were selected until he painted the volcano in the background. At that point, he passionately chose the Chasosaurus Wreck, or ‘Ancient Chinese Secret Dragon.’ For him, it meshed best with the pyroclastic fireballs and the chicken that he intended to hide in the lush contextual vegetation.

Chas made his diorama from a recycled, open fruit crate, but any open box or toy packaging would do. We keep an eye out for those packages with interesting frames for scenes–discarded toy packages often have these. With spray paint or acrylic gesso you can create a plain canvas out of your box. We used spray paint and it dried in 10 minutes. You can also cut out fantastic magazine spreads and individual images or abstractions for the background and adhere them with all-purpose glue or rubber cement. You can also do what we did, in this case: paint a background on paper with tempera or acrylic paints.

Once you’ve selected the toy animals or favorite subjects, give them a place within the diorama. You can either glue them in place with a hot glue gun or place them there temporarily. Chas uses his dioramas as docks, returning the animal to the diorama when he’s finished throwing them around the backyard. For vegetation, collect twigs, leaves, pine needles and bark. You can either glue these in place using the hot glue gun or leave them there temporarily, changing them out as you see fit.

There are no strict rules, this is a dynamic diorama for active little hands to play with. If you want to create a different type of habitat, just use your imagination and look around the house. When you’re finished, submit a photograph to the Boy’s Almanac Flickr Group! We’d love to see a whole gallery of these wonderful things. Imagine that!