For those of you like me who have looked for ready made 1/35 scale buildings to use in dioramas if you haven’t yet encountered Miniart then you can now stop looking. Miniart do an extensive range of full, partial, and destroyed buildings in vacuum formed plastic mouldings as well as a number of diorama bases that accomodate one or two of said buildings.
This particular one is one of their bigger offerings ( though not their biggest ) and portrays a portion of a European farmhouse building linked to a stone wall by a gate and with a pair of lean-to shelters up against that stone wall. It also includes a base with moulded paving stones – so naturally enough it’s title is ”Farmhouse with Diorama Base”. The design allows for this to be used as one large diorama or two smaller ones ( one with the house and gate, the other with the wall and lean-tos ).
The kit consists of twenty eight vacuum formed parts for the buildings and walls plus two vacuum formed parts for the base ( each measuring 21cm x 27cm ). There are also two spures of injection moulded accessories such as the doors and doorframes, window frames, window shutters, a wall mounted lantern style light, downpipes, and sections of fence.
The sprue parts require minimal clean-up, the instructions are clear and easy to follow and the kit goes together well and looks very impressive once complete.
There is a degree of skill required in assembling the building parts, the pieces need to be removed by scribing and snapping rather than cutting to get clean edges and once they are glued together they require a bit of filler and clean up to eliminate all sign of the central joint line. ( At a later date we will post up a step by step build of this building to show how it is done ). But this is well worth the effort as the finished building looks very good indeed.
The layout with the “inside couryard” which is not visible from the front requires a bit of thought when it comes to layout of vehicles and figures and this layout really lends itself best to dioramas that are intended to offer their best presentation to a view from above or where the diorama can be viewed from multiple angles.
Miniart buildings aren’t readily available in NZ ( most places I tried just resulted in blank looks ) but if you can get your hands on one for a reasonable price ( around $40 NZD for a simple bombed building to $100 for the larger building and dioramas ) then you’ll find them to be well worth the effort.
Click on thumbnails for larger image.
