We Have Ways Fest Diorama 2025
Hi everyone, Matt here and in today’s blog I would like to showcase the SAS diorama I am creating for display at We Have Ways Festival 2025.
Ok first things first. The studio has a new home! Woohoo. Its been a long time in the making, but having a dedicated space purely for the business is an incredible milestone. Im sure I’ll discuss more on that later, in the meantime lets focus on the festival.
So last years attendance at We Have Ways Fest was a bit of a reconnaissance mission for Conor and I. We took models to sell and enjoyed bringing the business to the public domain and chatting to folk. Its always so very humbling to have people come up to you and say that they are previous customers, or that they follow us on Instagram! So following a chat at the end of last years festival, over a bacon sandwich on the Sunday morning, Conor and I discussed how the stall could work next year. The first thing we both agreed on was creating a diorama to best showcase our work.
Our stall 2024
So for my diorama I wanted to created a simple piece terrain wise, preferring to focus more on the model painting, which lets face it Im trying to showcase our commission painting services at the same time, so I wanted the miniatures to tell the story and display what we’re all about at No Mans Land Studio.
In the end I decided to go for an SAS desert raid on a German transport vehicle - sdkfz9 (Famo). I was watching Rogue Heroes season 2 earlier in the year and remembered how much I enjoyed painting the SAS figures from Artizan Designs, North Star Miniatures. Easy decision then. Simple on the terrain, iconic setting and a bit of a talking point!
We’re also privileged to have an extra pair of hands in having Dean with us at the event this year. This means that we can focus on displaying our work and engaging with people, whilst I sneak off for a pint, I mean, help out…
So to start with I laid everything out roughly positioned how I envisioned the scene unfolding. As mentioned I wanted to keep things really simple with this and let the figures and their poses do most of the storytelling.
28mm figures by Artizan Design and Warlord Games
Once I had things in position I started laying the sand down for the road. Nothing fancy, just some brown texture from Vallejo and the desert roads grit/track set by Woodlands Scenics. This gave a nicely textured road. Once dried I would put down some more brown texture and press the Famos tracks into it to produce the track markings in the road and then build up the banks either side of it. Once the road was down I painted and then superglued the figures to the base, before applying a different blend of sand/gravel on the top of more brown texture for the open ground.
I added small pockets of dry grass to offer more variety to the ground. I have some desert tufts and vegetation pieces that I shall add at the end.
The Famo is going to be in flames so I didnt go overboard with the airbrush detail, showing glimpes of the original paintwork underneath a black overlay. Once the fire effect is added you’re not going to see much.
