Making of MUMMY dioramas
I recently was approached by the Historical Museum of Oslo to make three miniature dioramas for their exhibition MUMMY - a display of ancient Egyptian artefacts and mummies. Their requirements were that each of the three dioramas would portray a part of the life of one of the mummies from the exhibition, Dismut, a temple guardian’s daughter. Her Life, her Death and her Afterlife. In addition, they gave the maximum size of the display. This left me a lot of freedom for interpretation and to make the dioramas in my own way and style. In this article I’ll take you through part of my process for developing the three concepts. For a more detailed breakdown of the steps it took to complete the dioramas, see the videos.
My first focus was on the miniatures required. I searched online 3D-file shops to see what was already available. I knew this would be one of my limitations as there was no time or budget to 3D design all objects and characters required for all three dioramas. I found a pack of ancient Egyptian field workers, and so the Life diorama was created with this pack in mind - a tranquil scene by the Nile River, with workers harvesting wheat as Dismut observes from a higher vantage point. This diorama was also an opportunity to include some of the animals featured in the exhibition, so I found a cat and a mouse STL (and later a crocodile as well). As Dismut is not a famous pharaoh, there were obviously no STLs available of her, so I commissioned two 3D sculpts of her, giving me the chance to have her in the exact positions I needed for Life and Afterlife. In Death she would only appear as a mummified figure, easily available online.
I wanted the diorama to read from left to right, as the three dioramas would be displayed one next to the other, so as well as reading the specific Life diorama from left to right, I also wanted the entire display of all three dioramas to lead from left to right. I decided that from left to right the dioramas would also go from light to dark, Life being the lightest in tone and colour and Afterlife the darkest, reflecting the dioramas’ subjects. I decided on the scale for the entire display, around 50mm for humans, as this would be small enough to fit all the elements I needed, but large enough to fill up the dioramas with the amount of elements I found as STL’s and save me some time on not having to paint too many tiny details. I adjusted all STL’s to this scale, and found some realistic wheat plants online at the correct scale as well. And so the concept sketch for the Life diorama came together.
I knew that the Death diorama would be a burial ritual underground. I found a STL pack of several of the objects found in Tutankhamun’s grave, a burial ritual STL pack with two workers carrying a mummy and an ancient Egyptian priest. This would give me the scene. As the dioramas were going to have to be made as cubes, closed on all sides with walls, except for the front, as opposed to the open dioramas on display bases that we are used to, a part of planning each scene was also figuring out how to make the two sides and back panel a natural part of the dioramas. In Life this was an impossible task as no outdoor area is a cube, but I decided on making each side a rocky cliff and hoping the illusion of the scene would make the unaturally geometrical shape of the landscape become less visible. For Death my solution was a roller with Egyptian hieroglyphs. With this I could fill out each wall with historically accurate symbols and this way create interest in the surroundings of the scene as well. And for Afterlife, as this is already a “supernatural” scene, the walls would be bricks, extending the typical art found in Egyptian tombs portraying the Egyptian afterlife of Duat, into a 3D space. Generally I found a lot of inspiration and direction for this entire project from ancient Egyptian art and wall paintings.
The Afterlife diorama would have to have an Osiris character, the Egyptian God of the Dead, overseeing Dismut’s journey to Duat. As all STLs I could find of him had warrior poses, I instead commissioned a seated Osiris figure, as well as the scale that would measure Dismut’s heart against a feather, and thus if she is worthy of the Afterlife. I found a STL of Thoth, taking notes, and thought it suitable for the God judging the dead - in this case Dismut.
After the concepts were approved by the museum, so started a several months long process of getting the MDF walls for the cubes, cutting, carving and gluing XPS foam at the correct angles, sizes and shapes, painting around 40 miniature characters and objects, with airbrush and brush, creating and painting the landscapes, pouring epoxy resin for the Nile River as well as many other smaller and larger tasks. Of the many ideas that came during the making of the dioramas (not reflected in the concept sketches), one that I think especially contributed to the overall look of the final display, was the fact that I decided that each diorama would have its own main colour. Yellow for Life, sun and desert, Red for Death, underground an earthy, and Blue for Afterlife, cold and melancholic. This would differentiate the dioramas from each other even when being viewed from a distance, as well as give a natural progression from warm to cold, another way to add contrast and make the dioramas read in my preferred direction, from left to right. This was achieved most obviously through the choice of oil colours used to shade the three dioramas. Apart from that, the acrylic paints chosen are the same for all three dioramas, giving a cohesion of colour as well as being based on the available pigments they would have had at the time in Ancient Egypt - mineral pigments like lapis lazuli, red and ochre, soot for black, copper compounds for blue and green and synthetic pigments like Egyptian blue.
The final result is displayed here and will also be on display at Oslo’s Historical Museum for the foreseeable future. If you visit the city, make sure to stop by and have a look at the final display.
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