Adrian's Desert Oasis

My friend Adrian Balch has been working on a Heathrow diorama for many years but back in 2008 he also took on the job of making up several small quick dioramas made over just a couple of days. The first one we'll look at is his sandy desert diorama, which goes to show that not only is it easy to make a diorama but you can make it a lot more interesting than just a standard ramp scene.

This is the second post featuring Adrian's dioramas. For the earlier part see: The BEA Herald Story

The addition of palm style trees and a Sahara backdrop and you're in Tunisia

Here are Adrian's instructions for building this mini-diorama:

'On a small white Melamine-coated MDF board, I sprayed it overall in Primer Grey. Then I mixed up some Interior Filler (like plaster) and put it around two sides of the board to create 'sand'. As it dried, I then sprinked it with more interior filler powder so it had dry sand on top! The base grey hard standing (Primer grey spray paint) had dried and I marked out the apron slabs into 1cm squares with ruler and pencil. Finally, the Interior Filler powder colour is nearly white, so I sprayed it carefully with a sand colour artists aerosol spray paint that not only gave it the correct colour, but also bonded the sand together. I extended this spraying onto the apron to simulate a sand-swept airport. Finally, added a few touches of green modelling grass powder, then sprayed another board light blue for a Middle Eastern sky!'

The diorama was first used for a middle-eastern remote airfield with some of Adrian's MEA fleet:

Simply changing the background and tidying up the boundary with a more defined edge gave the diorama a more ordered look and takes us to Egypt in in the 1960s with United Arab Comet 4 and Boeing 707 plus a visiting Iraqi Trident:

Lastly the diorama doesn't have to be a desert setting. Change the background again and it's a beachside Caribbean airport. Here we have BWIA and BOAC Britannias and a later BWIA 707:

In the next part we'll go from the desert to the snow...