Modifying Military Buildings for a Diorama

Modifying and improving a WWII Diorama Kit

Making a Military Diorama is a lot of fun and the hobby is helped by the fact that there are lots of kits out there that will add realism to your diorama. These kits of course include aircraft, tanks, vehicles, soldiers and lots of accessories. But these kits also include lots of neat buildings from various war time eras - especially World War II.

I am going to show you some pictures of some of these various kits of buildings but first I want to say that you can modify them and make them even better! This is what diorama and miniature making is all about. And as a great example of this I will show you some pictures submitted by a web visitor (Glen). My thanks go out to him for his contribution. Well, Glen modified a terrific little European Cafe. I have pictures of this completed diorama right here

Here is the European Cafe model that he bought and modified. It is a partially destroyed building.

European Cafe And here is what the Cafe looks like right out of the box.

Typically you would paint this up and mount it in your diorama right? But there is a lot you can do to make this ruined building look much better and more realistic.

First let's take a look at the finished building. These two pictures show the front of the building and the inside of the building.

Now of course the painting is very importand and this is what is normal. You paint it to look natural and notice the red bricks of the edges of the walls. This is what would show when the building is broken like this.

But there are some other things that have been done to this building to make it special. Let's take a closer look at the inside of the building. The picture shows two terrific custom made additions to the cafe: The slatted wood floor and the posters on the wall (Which are time period correct!)

A look inside the ruined cafe

The miniature floor boards To make the floor boards shown at left Glen used some slats from Venetian blinds. He achieved the slatted board look by drawing on it with a pencil.

Under the floor boards And here is a look underneath to show you how he glued it all together.

Miniature posters Now for the wall posters

A little bit of online searching turned up lots of great posters that could be put on the walls of the cafe. It is simple enough to resize them and print them up on a sheet of paper as shown on the left. Just cut a couple of them out and glue them to the walls! And You are done. You have done some terrific little modifications to make a ruined building look even more authentic.

It almost looks like we are actually looking into a real building!

View through the destroyed wall of the cafe