To see ALL of the behind the scenes "making of" this project, go to our FORUMS HERE!
Tell us a little about yourself.
My nickname is yoda36, for I started uploading customs for Star Wars when I was 36, mostly on rebelscum.com and yakface.com. That is now eleven years ago. But I have been painting miniature soldiers and creating scenery from when I was a young child on. I only stopped when being a teenager.
Now that I’m an adult, I have the means and skills to do much more than ever before. In essence, my inner child never left the building. I moved from historical miniatures to Warhammer, Star Wars 3,5 inch toys and now the 6 inch LOTR Toy Biz figures. I started that seven years ago. I am married, have three (young adult) daughters and I am a minister in the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. For real? Yes, really.
How did you get your start in custom art? What was your first real project?
My real first project was the one where this interview is about. I once owned an Aragorn King, and Arwen on horseback. The sculpt, size and likeness were amazing and I liked them a lot, but I dispatched them, afraid of starting yet another expensive collection of toys….
When buying Star Wars toys on Ebay, I came across a seller that had a Treebeard figure for a low price. So I bought it, fell in love again with Toy Biz, and thereafter purchased a Merry, Pippin and Grishnack figure to create a scene. I own over 300 figures now, due to army building, of which about 70 are finished figures at this moment. I expect to be doing this customizing for two more decades probably.
Since I was a model painter, I redid the figures to make them look even richer in color and detail. And after that started customizing.
What was your inspiration for building the Fangorn diorama?
Thanks to the creative work on rebelscum and yakface, I knew about the quality that diorama brings to figures. They simply come to life when placed in a realistic environment. A shelf is just not the same, so I decided to create a diorama box.
The trigger was the fact that a tree was trimmed down by the city greenservice near our house. The branches had these mosses on them that gave it an age-old look. Just like Fangorn, I thought…. So I took a few and thought of a plan.
What is the size of diorama?
I have moved houses by now, but in my other house I had a wide shelf on which I could put the box. It had to fit tightly under the ceiling and have opening sides to create a good viewing line. In the pictures of the thread you can see how it worked.
The box was about 90 cm in height, 80 cm wide and 50 cm deep (35x31x20 inch) I made it from thick mdf wood.
What base figures did you use?
The figures are the Toy Biz figures. Merry and Pippin are unaltered apart from the paint. Frodo and Sam and Gollum are the original figures. Treebeard was a big customizing project of its own.
Your decor looks so realistic. What parts of the project were from nature?!
Only the trunks of the trees and the loose branches. The loose floor covering is dried up scribblies from a real forest floor. The branches are made with iron-wire covered with paper-maché and afterwards painted. The foliage I stuck in (one by one) is plastic decoration stuff, available everywhere nowadays. I created four trees, built from these real branches.
The floor has a model-train piece of artificial grass. I glued in real stones for rocks and a lot of loose plastic foliage items. And pieces of moss.
Talk about your modifications to the Toy Biz Treebeard? Why did you decide to make him taller?
His size simply did not do with the other figures. He was in no way intimidating enough. On figurerealm I saw a custom of someone who made a large Treebeard, so I went for it.
What I did was make four cuts: both upper and lower legs. I placed a big screw and drilled it through a wine cork as a leg extension. After that, it was filling up the legs with pattex construction glue and sculpting tree bark over it with greenstuff. I replaced the beard with real moss and put plastic foliage and train modelling foliage over the body. And did a repaint. The arm broke off, so I had to repair that along the way. Old toys remain.
Let’s talk about the overall Fangorn project. For the readers who have never built a diorama, how is this made?
The pictures in the thread show the story. First you decide where to put it when ready. That will be the limit of the size. Then you collect the base materials, in this case mdf plates and the branches.
I screwed everything together, making a strong box. I wanted light on the front, so I placed a piece of wood to hide the lamp. In the bottom I made a cut to create a small stream. No Fangorn without the entwash!
To paint a backdrop, I needed a good surface. MDF is horrible, for it sucks the paint like a dry sponge. I tried a white coating, but the paint did not catch on nicely. So I used packing paper as a sort of wallpaper. Painting the suggestion of trees worked very well on this Brown paper. I painted with cheap acrylics.
The trees are attached tightly by screws through the bottom and the sides.
The project actually has 2 scenes in 1. The Stairs of Cirith Ungol sit beside Fangorn. What was the reason to add the stairs?
Well, I had this empty side and more figures to place. The climb of the stairs was a catching scene, so I wanted to recreate this. And making rocks is always nice.
What was the process for Cirith Ungol? What material and process were used? I used polystyrene plates attached together. These I broke up by hand and started cutting in with a clipping knife. What a messy job!
The job for gluing them together is taping the sides with ducktape. On ducktape you can glue, polystyrene itself melts with most glues.
When I had the basic shape, I worked in the steps of the stairs one by one. They are made of wood. The trick was making a very steep stair which still would be realistic.
The platform sticking out is a piece of wood with some polystyrene. The whole lot I covered with paper-maché. I do not use plaster, for it is more fragile when dried up. And more heavy! The paper-maché does not really stick to the polystyrene, but it holds on like cling foil when dry.
As a finishing touch, I added small stones and rough sand in corners. These are the details that make it work. Oh, and some mosses.
The whole thing got a thick Brown undercoat, which I covered with grey acrylics. A wash with indian ink gave a deeper look. Afterwards I dry brushed the rocks with light grey. Over this I placed a wash of the darker grey. Some green in the corners and it was done!
Do you have any new LOTR projects lined up? Since I moved, I have a large display table. The box I took apart and the trees will become a Fangorn forest on the left, the stairs will be integrated in a portion of the walls of Mordor, with a decent Shelob’s lair. Someday...
How can your fans stay up to date with you? I have a thread on the customs forum of TheFwoosh where I place pics of the result and making-off.
I will be doing that on some new projects here on the site of lotrtoyarchive too in the future. There is also a thread on Figurerealm: https://figurerealm.com/customfigure?action=creator&id=40350 And for all my work (Star Wars too) you can check out my flickr account: https://flickr.com/photos/129686131@N05/albums
And you can find me on Instagram with: waltermiles74 or search for lotrcustoms there. I created this hashtag.
To see ALL of the behind the scenes "making of" this project, go to our FORUMS HERE!
Comentarios