Wildlifeart » Zoological museums rainforest dioramas

Building zoological dioramas

admin — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:50:32 +0000

Several readers have asked how Helsinki Zoological museums dioramas were build. There is not enought pictures of those diorama paintings that I made, but museum has made videos of building process of bear diorama. Seppo Polameri does the painting work and museum conservators the rest.

You can see glimpse of me around 1 minute.

In this video museum staff builds African drinking pond wiev. It took 2,5 months!

Australian rainforests

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:49:05 +0000

Rainforests in Australia seems to have a bit different atmosphere than in other continents. I tried to paint it. This diorama has lots of leafs and big birds. It was not necessary to make very detailed background painting.

All kinds of tools and paints.

Asia diorama background

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:41:56 +0000

Here is couple of pictures from huge painting that I made to Helsinki Zoological museum. This painting is 2,7m high and almost 5 meters long.

Unfortunately this “Ent”- tree is not visible since there is lots of stuff in foreground in front of it. But it is well possible that in future these paintings will be reused in different way.

African forest diorama

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:32:35 +0000

All together I painted 21,5m x 2,6m space roughly 50m2. Most diffiould part of the painting are the start and finnishing the painting. It was also confusing in the beginning that the value of the paint could chance up to 40% when it dries. So you can not believe what you see, but what you know there will be. Most of the painting work was done with halogen lights. Unfortunately lights are done with led lights (should be best quality) that do not show colours similarly. So I had to oversaturate some colours when painting.

I did enjoy the process of painting a lot! I painted usually 9-10 hours a day 6 days a week. The only thing I did not like was painting on ladder.

Most of the times I did not use scethes. I did draw the painting directly over underpaint layer.

Mandrillit

Work in progress:

When the led lights are on these rainforest leafs are same colour as the painted ones.

Almost finished

Amazon diorama painting

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 14:01:15 +0000

Here you can see step by step brogress of Amazon painting. This work is 7 x 2,5m. We use Harmony wall paint and lots of different brushes, rollers, sponge and branches for painting. There is detailed pictures of the painting method in Africa diorama post.

Panorama picture of nearly finished painting.

I started with the thunder cloud and open wetland. This 7 meters has several vegetation zones from open area to dence rainforest. This ofcourse makes it impossible to be very natural.

Here you can see how forest is growing:

Closeup. Leafs are 3cm long.

Finished diorama