Diorama supplies in 1:12 are civilian props for interior scenes: miniature board games including chess, go and shogi, a modelling corner with tools and part-built kits, small electronics, a radio-controlled car on the floor, a bicycle, spectacles and statuettes for an alcove. One twelfth is the home scale of articulated collector figures, so a scene here is built around a person rather than around a machine.
Read on for how to compose a room-sized vignette and why each prop is better painted off the base and seated only when finished.
One twelfth is the scale of articulated collector figures and of interior vignettes. A figure stands around fifteen centimetres tall, so the scene is a room rather than a landscape: a workbench, a shelf, a patch of floor, a wall with a picture on it. The range follows suit - these are the things a person holds or leaves on a table. Board games, a part-built kit, tools on a cutting mat, a radio-controlled car, a bicycle leaning against the wall. Objects like these carry the story, because they say at once what the figure is doing.
A good 1:12 vignette has one clear occupation: somebody is gluing a kit, playing a game, mending a bicycle. The props then follow from that activity and the scene fills itself. Work the other way round, buying a heap of props first, and you end up with a crowded table that says nothing.
In 1:12 the print on a box, the grain of timber and the sheen of plastic are all visible. Paint every prop separately, away from the scene, and seat it only when it is finished. Keep the sheens apart as well: paper matt, plastic semi-gloss, metal with a sharp highlight. One varnish over everything collapses the scene into a single lump of material.
An interior stands or falls on the floor and on the wall behind the figure. Tiles, parquet or concrete can be made from a paper print or cast from a mould. Keep the wall understated - the eye should be drawn to the figure, not to the wallpaper.
To start as simply as possible, build one shelf with three objects on it and try to tell a single sentence with them. When you want to extend the setting around it, look for parts in the same scale across the diorama supplies range.
