Daves Tugboat Diorama

Dave Roehrle completes his "Tugboat Series" of SBS features with this final installment, putting the three previous tugboat builds together into one fantastic diorama!

The base. . .

My first attempt at the base for my diorama started out with problems that compounded into more problems and ended in disaster. Some were my mistakes, and others were things that just happened. It seemed like I did everything over 2 or 3 times. I didn’t make the land high enough and my bridge was too heavy looking and too close to the water.

I used celuclay and it dried on the surface and didn’t dry inside. The moisture from it soaked through the foam in the base and caused the paint to lift and the plaster to get soft. After that I was on the verge of giving up completely. After taking a break for a few days I decided to start completely over on the base. I’m glad I did because the moisture caused mold to grow in between the layers of foam.

I started the new base by making patterns on paper for holes that the tugboats would fit into. For the base I used a 24-inch x 24-inch piece high-density polyurethane foam on the bottom and the top with a layer of blue insulating foam between them.


I positioned the patterns on the base and cut holes for the boats to fit through. The foam was then glued together with Gorilla Glue. I used wooden skewers to ‘nail’ the foam together before the glue dried.