Building Exhibits: Earth Sciences Gallery: Making the Mini-Dioramas
Museums create dioramas to put objects into a cultural or environmental context. Some dioramas can be created at full scale - the inside of a room, for example. But some, such as landscape scenes, are too big to fit inside a building. The solution is a mini-diorama.
The RSM created four mini-dioramas in the Earth Sciences Gallery to portray the Saskatchewan landscape at different intervals in its geological history.
65 millions years ago, when dinosaurs foraged through dense tropical forest.
37 million years ago, when rhino-like brontotheres, sabre-toothed cats and giant pigs roamed woodland savanna.
14 million years ago, grasslands with three-toed horses (relatives of the rhinoceros) and early pronghorn.
1.8 million years ago, just before glaciation when giant sloths, shrub oxen, and bone-crushing dogs lived alongside white-tailed prairie dogs in a very dry habitat.
Creating the shell was one of the most complicated tasks. Curved corners are necessary to create a seamless transition between the foreground and the painting. Exhibits staff used complicated equations to calculate the shape of the mold that would produce a corner equivalent to 45 degrees of arc or one-eighth of a sphere. The forms were made from wood strips and plaster and were used to cast the rounded exhibit corners in fiberglass.
Once the shell was built, the work on the miniature scene began. Rich Loffler, a sculptor with the RSM, and Dwayne Harty, a diorama painter, designed each exhibit under the direction of John Storer, the RSM's curator of Earth Sciences at the time. Rich sculpted the animals from clay, basing their appearance on what was known from current research. A mold was made from each sculpture, and casts were then created by pouring hot wax into the molds. Dwayne painted the background scenes, and added colour and details to the wax animal casts.
The foreground was created by Gord Prokopetz, a foreground specialist. All of the foreground elements had to be built to the same scale as the animal models. The miniature foliage, tree trunks, pools of "water," river banks and tufts of grass were made from materials like plastic and dried plants, sand, pebbles, twigs from the local park, sculpting clay, glue and paint. "Water" was made using a combination of plexiglass and "Clear Cast," a thick liquid that hardens into a translucent plastic. So, to give the rhinoceros the appearance of standing in water, its legs were submerged in a pool of liquid Clear Cast that was then allowed to dry. Finally, the foreground specialist and the diorama painter collaborated to blend colours and contours, creating a smooth transition from the foreground to the two-dimensional painting.
The final mini-dioramas look so real that you can almost hear the animals roar. Check them out when you visit the Earth Sciences Gallery . They'll capture your imagination!
For further information contact the Exhibits Unit