Diorama With Ruins

[Mike]

Diorama With Ruins

1:35 MiniArt

Another of MiniArt’s excellent diorama series, this kit would be better described as “Destroyed House Front with rubble” if you ask me. It arrives in a compact box, and contains two sheets of sturdy vacformed grey styrene, plus a sprue of similar coloured grey styrene that contains the ancillary and decorative parts.

The first of the two sheets is the vacformed base, which has a deep groove for the remains of the front of the building, and a pavement/sidewalk crossing the front of it that is almost totally covered by the layer of rubble on top of it. The rubble extends to the cobbled roadway, although this is less well covered.

The second sheet contains the upstands for the ruined building, which are again vacformed, with front and rear faces making up the front elevation, and another front/back pairing for the remains of the side elevation. A ruined and rubble-strewn step is also included for the front door aperture. A rather neat feature is that the portion of the building that drops within the base grooves is covered with a brick texture, so that any portion still visible will appear to be the foundations showing. The walls are rendered, and a lot of the underlying brick has been exposed where the walls have been damaged or collapsed. Impact damage and cracking of the render adds extra detail to amuse the eye of the onlooker.

The sprue of injection moulded styrene parts contains window frames of three types, beams, a front door, shutters of two types, and two lengths of wrought iron railings. These can be distressed and used as you see fit, with plenty of opportunity for weathering of the paint or varnish finishes. The louvered shutters are fully rendered, with light coming through between each slat, and the door/shutters have a fine wooden texture to them, which is sadly marred in a few places by ejector pin marks. They won’t take much removal, but some of the round headed nails might suffer during the process.

Conclusion

MiniArt excel at this type of diorama base, and this one is no exception. The parts are well rendered, and the use of a female vacform mould means that detail on the two sheets of parts are crisp and well realised. Because of the rubble-littered nature of the base, very few of the moulding “pips” show up, but where they are present, a quick slice with a new blade will remove them cleanly.

The only issue I can foresee when painting up the base will be knowing where to make the demarcation between rubble and the original pavement and roadway. Some additional debris added from your stores of bricks, stones and general grit will probably alleviate this to an extent. For some extra realism, some of the window frames could be partially glazed, using microscope slide cover slips, which are made from incredibly thin glass. Break a few carefully and glue them in with PVA or GS Hypo Cement, and you have some realistically scale glass. Just make sure you don’t hurt yourself, or leave any shards around for the family or pets to skewer themselves on. You have been warned!

Recommended.

Review sample courtesy of