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 kit is one of their simpler offerings and portrays a paved area bordered by an L shaped wall, with a large wooden gate at one end and a smaller gate in the side. It can be seen as either the inside of a courtyard or as a paved drive leading up to the entry to one and looks like it would be at home in any part of Europe, though I imagine it to be more in the south western areas but that could just be me.
The design allows for this to be used as either one larger diorama or two smaller ones – one with the large gate section and a half of the side wall, the other with the rest of the side wall and the small gate.
The kit consists of eighteen vacuum formed parts for the walls plus two vacuum formed parts for the base ( each measuring 21cm x 17cm ). There are also two injection moulded sprues with twenty parts for the doors and their hinges. 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. The grass shown on the cover art isn’t part of the kit I’m affraid, so you’ll need to add your own.
I’m not usually a fan of every building looking bombed to bits but I like this one as the damage in the wall could be made to look equally like the result of time and neglect. Often when doing damaged sections the requirement for the debris from the damage to be somewhere nearby gets overlooked, but here Miniart have included a moulded heap of rubble. It needs bulking out a bit but it’s a good start.
There is a degree of skill required in assembling the wall 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 one of the Miniart buildings to show how it is done ). But this is well worth the effort as the finished scene looks very good indeed.
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 thumbnails to enlarge images.
