Egyptian Tomb Inspired Book Nook
Introduction: Egyptian Tomb Inspired Book Nook
Welcome to my first Instructable! During 2020, I was taken with beautiful images of "book nook" dioramas going around the Internet. I don't have any real experience with miniatures but I decided to give it a try anyway as a quarantine craft. This is the result! I certainly made some mistakes along the way, but overall I'm pleased with how it turned out. This may give you some ideas to try designing a diorama of your own.
I went with an ancient Egyptian theme mostly because it's cool, but also because I thought I could get away with making things out of foam, which sounded the simplest and cheapest to me.
Supplies
Materials I used:
A hinged cardboard box
A craft knife
A small screwdriver (normally used for electronics)
Foam (several thin sheets of fun foam and one sheet of 6mm thick foam)
Modge Podge glue (lots of it)
Acrylic paints
Paint brushes (mostly the cheap kind that could handle working with glue)
Shrink film - the printer friendly kind
Printer paper
Paperclips
Metal thumb tacks
Craft sand
Image editing software (I used Gimp)
Popsicle sticks
A hammer
A nail file
Step 1: Preparing the Box
I found a cardboard box with a hinged lid at the craft store: I wanted to use that as the base because it would be easy to open the box up and access the inside. I used a craft knife to cut the front of the box open. Then I used a little electrical tape to smooth out the cut edges. I picked electrical tape because of the color, but if I did this again I might use masking tape: it has a better texture for painting and gluing over.
Step 2: The Doorway
I spent some time looking at images of Egyptian tombs online and found some pictures of doorways carved and painted with hieroglyphs that I wanted to imitate.
I started by cutting a rectangle of my thicker foam sheet, just slightly smaller than the inside of the box, then cut out the opening. I also added a couple of stacked rectangles at the top to give it more dimension.
After a little experimentation on a scrap foam sheet, I used the tip of a small screwdriver to carve the symbols I wanted into the foam. I don't actually read hieroglyphs; I just copied pictures I saw online. It would be rad if I accidentally cursed myself but most likely it's just gibberish.
The most important detail I included was a carving of Ma'at, the goddess of balance. I also used a nail file to weather down some of the edges to try to make it look older.
Finally I coated the entire thing with a layer of modge podge glue. 644
Foam doesn't hold paint well because it's such a porous material, so the glue creates a seal around the foam that paint can hold on to. All of the foam in this project got the same treatment.
Step 3: Shrink Film Tomb Painting
My parents have a painted sheet of papyrus that my mother got on a trip to Egypt as a teenager; I thought it would be neat to recreate that image as a tomb painting. Rather than try to paint it by hand, I loaded a photo of the papyrus onto my computer and then recreated it in an image editor. I then printed my new version onto a sheet of shrink film.
I made a mistake here: I forgot that the colors in shrink film become much more saturated when the film is shrunk in the oven. The result ended up a lot darker than I wanted. If I did it again, I would use colors much lighter than what I wanted in the full size print.
On the plus side, the shrunk down film has a slightly rough texture that works great for fake stone. It also can be painted, which helped with blending the "painting" in with the other surfaces later on.
Step 4: Foam Stone
To get a rough stone-like texture, I grabbed a few sheets of foam and a hammer, then took them outside to the sidewalk. I whacked the back of the foam with the hammer so that the front side would pick up texture from the asphalt. I ended up using two different hammers; a regular one and a rubber mallet, which has slightly different results on the texture.
I cut one sheet into large bricks that I arranged on one side, leaving space for my tomb painting. I deliberately had some space in between the bricks and uneven edges to try to make it look more realistic. I have to admit, this process was so incredibly fussy that I got sick of it. For the other sides I just carved grooves into a full sheet of foam. 74