Dewback Patrol (built 1999)

3 ¾" Kenner-Hasbro figures and Micro Machines Action Fleet figures don´t fit together in one common diorama. Or maybe yet?
Dave Dorman created a painting, which he called "Dewback Patrol". It shows all elements of the droid-search from the Sandtroopers for R2-D2 and C-3PO. In the movie you can see these elements in single scenes, not in one entire picture. So, you see the Sandtrooper with the Macro-Binocular, one other Trooper, who shows his commanding officer a ring of C-3PO and the escape pod, which is inspected by a couple of Sandtroopers. In the Special Edition of Episode IV, Lucasfilm inserted also the started Heavy Assault Shuttle and the Dewbacks now moves.
All that, I wanted to bring together in o n e diorama. All to build with 3 ¾" figures and Dewbacks.
But allways remaining the realistic distances turned very soon impossible to made.
The diorama would have got to gigantic, so I decided to use both 3 ¾" figures and the Action Fleet-figures. First I built the corpus. So, groundplate, sideplates and rearplate. Topplate and frontside are in acrylglas. Corners are not nice in a diorama. Therefore, I formed them with PU-Foam and two bottles (for the shape) nice round. The landscape was errected with polyurethane foam and styropor-plates.
Then, all was surfaced with a wet-room-surfacer and brought to shapes of a real dune-sea. This part, Claudia took over, who knew all the right following of the dunes like in the movie.
After it, she stroked the landscape with glue and sanded it with very fine tunesian sand (brought home from our trip to Tunesia). In front, I arranged the 3 ¾" Sandtrooper and the 2 Dewbacks.
The time when I built the diorama, the Sandtroopers were still the first design with the "Masters of the Universe"-muscles. The realistic Sandtrooper with a good Macro-Binocular was released years later.
Difficult it had been with the Trooper with the Macro. One other got a bress-disk in his hand. The officer is the only Trooper, who - like in the movie - has a Blaster. The others have rifles. About in the center of the left side, there is the escape pod and two troopers (Action fleet). A little far on the right side, a Dewback with rider, also Action Fleet. Near the rearplate on the left side, the Heavy Assault Shuttle has landed. It is from the "Jabba"-Head Playset. Also, I put out from this playset a Dewback with a rider, which I placed near the rearplate on the right side.
Therefore, I have three sizes of figures. The diorama really "lives" through this effect of a so called "perspective depth". If you view it from above or diagonal from behind, then it looks wrong. But if you look at it from the frontside in height of your eyes to the troopers, now an endless depth opens to the viewer.
The tiny figures in the background seem to be hundred of meters away.
The effect was succesful. At the end, I painted the pauldrons (leather-shoulderparts of the Sandtroopers) according to the rank-explanations of the book "STAR WARS The Visual Dictionary" of the classic Trilogy.

For larger images click the pictures.

© Thomas Riedel 2002