Winter Diorama Class

1. Winter Diorama Introduction: Hello, Welcome to the winter diorama class. My name is Cheryl and I'll be guiding you through the whole process. We're gonna make this winter diorama. I am using several different syntax dies with the big shot machine to create all the little pieces to go in with it. However, if you have a different type of dye machine, die cutting machine, you absolutely can use it. If you happen to have a quick machine, you could probably find a bunch of different SVGs to use that would give you a similar result. So I have two different options that you could choose. One is this one. We embossed the stars. And you can see as I turn it in the light, it has a little bit of northern lights or to it, That's quite, we also have dispersion that you could make. So this one here looks very similar until you turn the lights on. So this one here we're going to be doing and die cutting stars in the sky. It does as well, have the subtle Northern like tick in it as well that changes as you turn it in on light. This class also includes a supply list that will have the different supplies that are used in the depth going to help you with sourcing all of your supplies and finding the moment. If you have any questions throughout the class, please don't hesitate to reach out and ask me, I'm happy to help. Now let's get started making our winter diorama. 2. Basecoating the Wood Panel: All right, so the very first step we need to deal with our wood panel is base code it go I'm doing this one. Navy blue color. I did this particular one, silver. You can do it whatever color you are wanting to get, whatever color scheme it is that you are wanting for your fricking. Now the one thing to note and you may have already seen it is if you're wanting to do the version that has the lights in it, you need to drill a little hole in your paneled. I did it about a third of the way in one in the center because I wanted to put my battery pack in the back in the center and have the space for the court and stuff like that on the back. So the first thing I'm going to do is base coat my back. I know you don't actually see the back of your projects, but it just has a much nicer finished look. If you have a base coat of it. This particular paint that I'm using has a lot of pigment to it. So I end up having to use a lot of water with it in order to make it flow a little bit better. As well as the fact that yet that using a little bit less paint, because there's so much pigment you can thin it out and spread it out a little bit more. So I'm going to do the back and I'll do the sides first. And then I'm going to let it dry and then I'll work on that front areas. And then typically what I do is I do something like this where I've done that. And then to get rid of all the brushstrokes, I go right from top to bottom. So I'd like them to To not have brushstrokes been all over the place. If you find that you haven't covered it quite as much as you'd like. You can always add a second coat once it's dry. But yeah, definitely. You have to get that first codon there first in order to get its completely coated. And if you do end up having to go with a second coat, what I tend to do is the second coat like so this one I went lengthwise, second coat, if you need it, I would go this way opposite of the green. I tend to find you get a little bit better coverage that way. Or sides to go. Love this shade of blue at such a pretty color. You may notice some of the parts that have a lot of water in it, you said to see a little bit of the width grade. So if we ended up wanting to have like a bit of a blue stain, you could easily do that with this peak, just put extra water in it. And then you'd have more of a statement. All right. So my furnace is turned on and I'm finished the back and the side. So I'm going to let this completely dry. And then we will work on painting. It commemorates the back of our frame is completely dry. My furnace is now off and share a craft room with our furnace and our hot water takes so most of the time it's not an issue, but if you're trying to fill the video, it creates a lot of background noise, so kinda distracting. So I try to not be doing any bit videos what's going on? So now I'm painting a painting at the front frame. I'm not painting this part here because we're going to be going all of our dicots and our breath backgrounds to it. And I would rather be gluing to the wood then to paint. It's just going to have a better solution in my opinion. No front legs. Absolutely horrible. Submit wasn't being super careful, but that's okay. I'm doing this front part last on purpose so that I can make it look nice and finished. And it's because it's the first thing that you're going to see when you're seeing your project, it's the most important. So I always do the other bits first and then leave that for last. And then I mean this is heavy enough. It's not going to move a whole lot, but I typically will hold it in the center where there is no paint. So that don't get paint all of my hands, but I can also fold everything stable. All right. So that part is all painted. I'm just getting any of the brushstrokes editor. I'm going to let that completely dry. And then then the next step that we're going to start working on is the sky background. So I'll see you for that. 3. Inking the Sky: All right, so the first step to our card is we're going to do this background here. Now I happen to know for my frame that this inside pieces 63 quarters, so I'm going to cut my card stock accordingly. I'm going to show you both different versions doing the one with the embossed stars as well as for one with the cutout stars with the gold bell and behind it. So I'm going to end up creating two different backgrounds. And I'll show you how to create the different versions. So if you don't want it to light up and secondary care, you don't want it to light up like that. You don't have to if you want it to just have the embossing, you absolutely can do that as well. This just adds a little bit extra to it, but either one works perfectly. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to cut this at 63 quarters and the long side. Keep this because we're going to use it to distress, create a distressed background for little snowman. So you want to keep that and we're going to work on that. This part here. I'm going to cut. So this is just over five inches here. So I'm going to cut one piece here, five inches. And that's going to be for my version where I'm going to die cut the stars over the background. The other case, I'm just going to leave it like this. It doesn't you don't need to have a piece that's going to be the entire background because all of this is covering the back. It only needs to go to this just behind the mountains there. All right, so we've got our pieces of there. Let's start working on our background. And I'm only going to actually inker, even though I'm creating to show you two different versions, I'm really actually going to ink one of them on this video simply because they're both inked exactly the same way. You don't need to see me doing the exact same thing. Repetitive. We repeatedly. So my ink pads are freshly inked. So they've got a lot of ink on them. I'm using oxide ink because I just like how premium is I like health like different colors blend together. And it just has a more opaque look. Once we've inked our backgrounds, I'm going to use some purposeful pearls to create kind of a northern lights. Look on it. Just to add a little tiny bit of shimmer to this guy. It's not going to be very bold and bright. It's going to be very muted. And something that you actually don't necessarily see. Surely. You don't necessarily see it until you tilt the frame. So I'm gonna be kind of a little, little bit of a surprise in there. All right. Few of the light blue streaks there. So I'm just gonna go with the darker blue. The nice thing with the oxide inks as they stay wet for a little while. So you can take your time with inking them, as well as the fact that if you happen to get a splotch in there, it's really easy to blend it out. I'm going to get some of this light pink here and just add just a little touch of pink to go behind the mountains there. So you know, I've gotten a little bit of pink right there. I can use my pink went to blend it or I can go back into my light blue one. The oxide is just tend to be a little bit more forgiving when it comes to blending your inks. We're going to put the caps back on here. And then I'm gonna do my perfect girls. Now, tap them onto the desk like this to make sure that your pearls or to the bottom. If by chance you get some tucked into the little lid, they will go out on, on your surface and you'll end up wasting them. So if we do this, that makes sure that they're all on the bottom and you're not going to end up wasting a bunch of perfectly perfect girls. So I'm tapping my brush in here, tapping the brush with my finger, you get some of the excess off. And all I'm doing is dropping them onto my background here. These oxides will also stay wet for a little while longer. So once I have as many as I want, I'm just going to take my brush here. Little bit of a circular motion. Kind of blend them a little bit into my ink there. What I tend to do before doing the northern lights as I tend to go and look at a bunch of pictures just to kinda see what they look like. To get us a little bit more realistic looking, intend to be more on the green side, little bit of pink and blue. So I'm doing mostly green. And then you can brush your brush onto just an old cloth, cleaning cloth, that sort of things. And I'm going to add a little bit of the pink to it. And again, I'm dipping my brush in and tapping the excess off. You can always add more to it. But if you get too much, it's kinda hard to get a lot of the excess off. You can get some of it off, but I always find it's much easier to build layers rather than accidentally get too much on there. Now I'm doing a little tiny bit of the purple. And I'm going to do it when we're close to where the pink is. Now. This looks a little bit more bold right now, but it won't in a second. A lot of that is the powder that's on the top. And what we're going to do, some of it isn't loose powder. So we're just going to take we're going to tap it, tap it with their fingers. And the other third way to get the excess off your best friend is going to be a Swiffer duster. And that's gonna take some of the excess off. And I just have one of these and I keep it with all my perfect girls so that anytime I'm using them, I use that same duster. You don't need to have a new one for every time that you use it. Now the thing with perfect pearls is they have a binding agent in them that is activated with water. So you have to, once you're done what you're doing, you have to lightly missed it with water. I was a little bit heavy handed with that. You don't necessarily need to do it quite as much as that, but there was just some places that got a little bit blushed. But I want to make sure that I get it completely covers so that it does set my perfect girls. Now, the distress oxide is will react with the water. And that's going to end up creating little bit of a splotch. You look on this on the sky. And I knew that was gonna happen and that's what I wanted to happen. And I quite like the way it looks. It kinda looks a little bit like starting a little bit like galaxy, that sort of thing. I just tend to like that look. So this has to be 100% completely dry before we go to do the embossing or before we go to do the dye cutting the stars that are there. So I'm going to set this aside to dry. And in the next video I'm going to show you how to do the background with the embossed stars like that. So we'll see you in the next one. 4. Embossing the Stars: All right, So our sky is dry and we're ready to emboss the source. So I haven't have a stencil and I'm going to use some bursa Mark encourages. You can either use it for watermarking or you can use it to emboss because it's an input stays wet for awhile. If by chance you happen to have a star stamp fat ground, you could absolutely use that here. But I'm going to happen to have one, so I'm going to be using my stencil here. So I've used my ink through the stencil and now I'm putting my gold embossing powder for the stars. And because we press the ink through a central, you may or may not get perfect star shapes, and that's totally fine. It's not meant to be absolutely perfect. So if you haven't embossed before, the embossing powder is like a little granules. And what you need to do is put the heat gun over top of it. When it's not melted, it's kind of matte color. But as it in bosses and as it melts, it go shiny. And this particular heat going, like I said before, is more gentle heat. You can absolutely use it. Absolutely use it for embossing, but it's just gonna take a little bit longer. See you need to be patient with it. But again, if I was doing a lot of embossing, I would use heat gun that had a higher heat to it. It was a little bit more direct. You see how close I got into this? I see how somebody who was our shiny now, those are the ones that are emboss. So the heat gun also takes a few minutes to actually form up to melt the little granules of embossing powder. So you may have noticed too that my heat or my ace Denzel was not big enough for the entire sky and that's totally fine. So I did a little bit, I am embossing it. Once the embossing on these ones are done, I am going to go and do the same thing in this open area here. And if you wanted, you could emboss snowflakes or something else in the sky as well. If he had it happen to have a say of settlers stamp that had a moon or something, you could do that as well. I just like how it adds just a touch, a sparkle into the sky. Embossing is a fun thing to do with kids as well. You have to make sure that you show them how to be careful with the heat from the heat gun. But it's almost like magic when the embossing powder goes from a matt gold to the shiny glossy goal, right? So that is the John. And I put this back in my container. And then I'm going to put my back down. Now one thing, there are little dots of gold all over this and it's because I wasn't super careful with the powder. If I was doing something, if I was embossing something where I wanted a super crisp image, I would have made sure to flick the excess off. But for this particular purpose, I like those little flexible I think it adds to it. It looks like stars that are a little bit farther away. All right, so I can actually see right through the stem cell where my embossed stars are. So I can make sure that I'm not covering them. Test the power, press the stamp pad again for Katara and all this excess like you saw goes right back into the container so you don't have to worry about only pouring out just a little bit so you don't waste it. Nothing gets wasted because everything goes right back into the container. And my little mouse here that I was doing the distress on as well. I could use that to emboss on as well. It is heat resistance, so it's going to protect my surface from the heat from the heat gun. So if you didn't actually want to be holding it, but I tend to like to hold it because you can turn it into a little bit better in order to see exactly where the embossing is happening and to see what it's done. The main thing you wouldn't wanna do is you would want to be embossing, say right over top of your fingers as holding it in one place, it does get quite warm and you don't want to burn yourself. Almost there. The other thing you could do is you get heat underneath it as well. So sometimes that helps to keep the underside of the card stock. If you happen to have a problem with your cards document or things, that might be the solution for you. Alright, so this is done. And you see, I mean, there's a couple of stars that I have Half-stars just from the way that I was putting the ink through the sensible, but that's totally fine. I'm not worried about that. I don't think it has to be perfect and I don't think anyone's going to be inspecting it that closely. So this is how to do the background with the embossed stars. If you didn't want to use lights behind it. 5. Die Cutting the Stars in the Sky: She just hate it when you do something perfectly, only to realize that you forgot to hit the record button. Alright, so I've got a piece of paper here that is not inked. But I'm going to show you how I die cut this, this particular dye has edges all the way around it. It's intended to be a dicot for the front of a card. But because I want to do it on a space that's bigger than that. I'll show you the trick to it. So what I'm gonna do at first, my paper here is just a little bit wider. But the technique is exactly the same. I'm putting the top edge and the side edge just inside the cutting edge on the die. And then I'm going to take some tape here. You could use washington tape. You could use painter's tape. Just a type of hate that will be easy for you to take off. So I'm going to take that paper in place. And then I'm putting my paper and die inside the machine. But instead of putting the plate to cover the entire thing, I am going to show up the plate in. And I want the edge of this plate to come just shy of the cutting blade on my die. That way there's not gonna be any pressure there and that's not going to die cut. We go. So see how there's no cutting line there and that's because the plate wasn't on it. So then it was nothing for it to cut. The plate did cut the edge of my tape, but that's totally fine. The purpose of the tape is to keep it all in place so it doesn't happen to shift on you while you're putting your thing through your machine. A lot of these stars fall rate out. If they don't fall out, you can take your die painting, you can poke them out. And I typically post them from front to back so that if anything is attached, I can just pull it. And if the card stock rips, it's on the back side of V.gov. Now this one here is going to be, this particular picture is a little bit longer then to my diorama. So you can only do this if you couldn't do this for an indefinite piece of paper because you need the code. The plate is going to be on one edge of the die. So you can only do this for something that's just slightly shy, twice the size of the die. If that makes sense. There's no way to have the plate not on both edges. It can be on not on one edge, but the plates or the size that they are. It's impossible to not have it covering one of the edges. You could try. If you really wanted to do something bigger, you could try having the plate here and then not running it through all the way through. But that gets a little bit complicated. And I think myself, I probably wouldn't have a whole lot of success with that, but it is something that you could try if you wanted it a little bit whiter. Alright? But my plate, and again, once again, it's just shy of the cutting edge. And then we run it through there. So I did cut that edge off because the plate went rate over this cutting edges within what he was getting out before. But there we have a full edge that has dicot stars. Some of these in here are not totally perfect because the plate didn't quite go over the edge of some of the stars or whatever. But when your background is all inked and stuff like that, it kind of hide some of that so you don't have to worry about it quite as much. Once you have your stars cut out. I just took that to the side. We can glue it to our gold vellum. Now for this particular sample, I did bold Golan because I wanted my stars to be bold. If you have, say, a snowflake die cut and you wanted snowflakes in the background, you could do white or silver vellum. But what I would do here is I have an adhesive that's just all dots on a scrap piece of paper here. And I'm going to run it down here. And the reason is I want to glue it onto my vellum. But I can't use a liquid glue because velum does not like liquid, that makes it warp. Here we go. So you have to have a dry glue, but if you have tape, it's going to go reach for the stars. The perfect type of adhesive is something like that, that has dots. And by doing it on a scrap piece of paper, anything that went inside the stores just ends up going onto my scrap piece of paper. And I will toss that in the garbage because I don't need that anymore. And there we go. We have our dicot background with the velum stars. And I can trim them down if I wanted. It's going to be stuck behind the mountain. So we're actually not going to see any of that. But it's going to look really cute with the light behind it. 6. Distress Background for Snowman Scarf: All right, so now we're going to create a distressed background for our snowman scarf. And this is just a great way to incorporate the colors that were used in the sky into the rest of the design. So I'm going to also add a little bit of perfect girls. Now there's two ways that you can put them on here and you can use your brush that we used. And instead of tapping it back into the container, you can tap it onto your inks there before we add the water. Or you can use, I tend to like to use a little bit of a sort of a straw and I use this for when I'm using literalists. Well, that's a really nice scoop. That's the perfect size. And fairly inexpensive if you happen to have kids that like to have these every once and awhile. Always nice to reuse things that we haven't everyday life. Alright, so I have a little bit of each of the colors in there. And they are going to blend in with the inks. While we're doing this background. And they're just going to add a little tip, tiny bit of sparkle to Pittsburgh. So this particular piece of paper is fairly thin and narrow, so tough them all n. And then we need to dry this background here. It doesn't need it to be a 100 percent dry, probably 80 to 90 percent. So then we can tap it into the ink again to add a little bit of splotches, a little bit of interest. And the nice thing about this is it's plenty to dicot the scarf out of. So you have lots of room to find your favorite spots and just die cut those. And if you look at this snowman, the scarf is fairly tiny so you don't need a whole lot of paper to do this. You can even use a solid color if you wanted. Like I said, I just thought it was a great way to incorporate the same colors as the sky. And just have that scarp tie that snowman, a big blotches on this end here that are kind of a little bit gray. So I'm just going to take a paper towel here. And I'm just going to tap some of the excess off of that. And when I do that is mostly dry, so I'm just going to tap into some of those aches. Try not to get rid of some of these pinks that I don't want to completely cover it up. And if I was working on the background for a card, I would make sure that I have the entire surface covered as much as possible because we're a die cutting this. I'm not worried about that. I'm just worried about we're not really worried. I'm just trying to create an interesting background, so I'm not necessarily trying to have it completely covered. If you're new to this technique, It's also a great way to try it out and play with it. Because if your dicot in your look at, so what's the way the background turns out in a different way than if you're using it for, say, the base of a card or something. And this particular heat gun that I'm using, it's a heat tool. It's intended for drying aches and drying blues. I will use it for the emboss star background. You can use it for embossing, but it's a little bit more of a gentle heat. So when you do do embossing with it, it just takes a little bit longer, which is totally fine with you doing one or two things. If you're doing an assembly line and having a lot of thumb that you wanted to do, a lot of embossing. You might want a little bit more of a powerful heat gun. But for this, it's part of it. I'm going to try to tap into some of the lighter of my inks here. And I typically do this about three or four times. You could do it more than that if you want. I just do it enough till I find some interesting areas for this particular project that I know I want to die cut from. For other projects, you just do it until you have a background that you like that's suitable for whatever project you're doing it with. And adding the perfect pearls to this. Like I said, it doesn't make it completely shimmery. It just adds little blots. It flushes of shimmer within your background, tiny little bit of color. But because we're using both the oxides and the perfect pearls for the sky. You have those anyways, it's always nice to incorporate into the project more than once. All. Almost dry. And I think this is the last the last layer that I'm going to do because I've got lots of spots here that I can die cut little bits there then I'll let dry. But you can see it on the camera. But there's a little tiny bits of some of the, some other shiny parts are the ink. But a lot of that is from my capacitors mixing in with the links there. So I'm going to let that finish strong. And you want to make sure it's a 100 percent dry before you start dice heading for your snowman, you could even use it for the snowman hat if you wanted. But that's a great way to include the same colors into your background. Will see you in the next video and we're going to start doing some die cutting. 7. Diecutting the Mountains: All right. So the very first day I got there, we're going to do is the mountains. This is the dye that I am going to be using. So I need to separate my pieces. We're going to do two of the same mountain range and we're going to connect them together. One is not quite wide enough for our piece here. So that's going to be my weight, that's going to be my blue or light blue, and that's gonna be my dark blue. So I only need one piece of the white. Two sets will fit on there. I have two upper blue and then to the Flu, my pieces here are four by six. And so four by six, it makes it a little bit short on the bottom, but because we are layering in, the bottom is going to be covered, so we're not going to see that. And I would recommend choosing your colors for your dicots after you've done your sky because then you can match them. Because while planning this project, this is what I had planned. And while it looks fine, I just thought of blue in there would be a little bit warmer. But you can do whatever suits you, but easier to choose them once you have your sky finished. Because then you can just lay your pieces or layer colored cards, dot colors in front of them and see what is going to work for you. Alright, so I need to this one. And when you've seen the diorama, I said we were using two of each of these because we're going to join them. But you actually don't see the join because we're going to use the trees to cover it up. So there's one joint here. There's the tree is covering up. There is one down in here that the tree is covering up. So we have a way of hiding them so they're not going to be visible. The obvious if there's a joint in there. If you don't have a physical machine and you don't have this dicots and you're choosing to do this with a cricket. And you could always adjust your SVGs and make them the size that they need to be when they are done. Now we're gonna do the later of the blues. I'm gonna do it this way here. And I could probably get away with a smaller piece of card stock for this one. The reason I've got these cut to four by six is because 12 by 12 sheet of card stock cut really evenly into four by six. So that way I don't have a bunch of little slits and pieces. It's just easier to cut it all into four by six and then know that those are going to be big enough without a ton of it looks like there is this my light piece. There is some waste there, but you can always use that for other dicots as well. So let's go other blue one. And what I typically do when I'm done, cutting is made an outline is doing it. So if I have the right pieces right where I need them. Often, if you just do that with your dicot that you split this full rate out if it doesn't already followed. Otherwise, you can use a towel pick to pick it out. Recycling. If we put these back in my little envelope here, these are just that little envelope that comes with the dye system TO followed. I typically keep that so that we don't have to worry about losing pieces or having them slide. The thicker envelope. One little bit. Wonder square. Now lose that little tiny day because I dropped it so many times. There are some there. Let's cut that 11 more time and then you will have all of our pieces and be ready to start assembling them. And like I said, I've got all my pieces, cut it into four by six pieces. But you could always, a lot of these would fit into scraps. That you can use. A bunch of different scraps, cutting them up, using them up that way. Right, Farewell sweet got all of our pieces for our mountains, will see you in the next video where we'll put them together. 8. Assembling the Mountains: Let's glue our mountains together. So I am using distress collage medium because I like the fact that if any of it seeps out from underneath my dicot, it's going to dry mat and you're not actually going to see that it's there. The other type of glue that I typically like to use is the Tombow Malte. But the only thing is, is if some of it seems so with that one, tumble multi ends up drawing kinda like a post-it note. So you end up seeing it as well as the fact that it ends up being tacky. So we're going to be, I'm adding a little bit of glitter to our dipoles just to make those snow a little bit sparkly. And if there's any of that tumble multi that has seeped through and is visible, you will get your glitter sticky to it, which may or may not be what you want. But it's always nice to have control over exactly where it is going to stick, on, where it's not going to stick. So and I also typically, if I'm if I'm gluing a bunch of pieces down all at once, I will take the lid off my glue and just have it sitting in a cup upside down so that the glue is ready to go. And then I'm not constantly fiddling with the I wouldn't leave this like this for a long time because I don't want the clued us to dry up on that nozzle. So I will between these different dicots that we're cutting but as I will put the cap back on the glue and during that time. But it's quite handy to have it uncapped while you're assembling each one of those pieces. So that guy is done. We set him aside to dry. Let's take the second one. And you can see I'm not super precise with my glue. I just try to make sure that any of these edges sticking out have some on there. Because really when your project is together, you're not going to have someone going in and touching and trying to lift things. And if you do or don't have anything to say after that, the goin is no one's going to be testing your glue, so I typically don't worry about it. This is not going to be like a card that you have to put into an envelope and make sure that nothing catches onto edges or anything. So and when I first was putting this, these mountains together, I would look at the image on the front of the envelope to know for these pieces, we're going to put these mountains together so many times now, but just know where they go. More or less a piece here. And there we go. Now typically would let that sit for a few minutes before sticking them together together to assemble that the rest of my pieces. But for this, we're going to be doing it in this video. So I just have a piece of tape here. It's meant for card making and scrapbooking, just one sided tape. I'm gluing those two pieces together because I want them to be as one for inside our frame size or frame that I am using. I just know that six and three-quarters is the length that needs to be. So I'm going to cut it to that length. And this other piece of mountain you can save for a card, you could do whatever you want with it, but we don't need to use it for this project. So now what we're going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of glitter to my mountains. I'm just using distress glitter. It's a clear letter. You could use an opalescent glittery as well. You could use a white footer. Whatever you like. This is just going to add a little bit of sparkle, which will end up being just a little bit of texture. And I'll just add, just be something that the light will catch. And you'll notice I'm not going all over the white. I'm not completely covering the white. If you wanted white glitter and go entire piece or white cover, then I would probably just dicot glitter card stock. All right. So I just typically put it on the tops, dump the glitter down, tap the excess off, and there we go. So I'm going to set that aside to dry. And I'll put this, this excess glitter back into the container. And by the time we are ready to assemble our piece, that glitter on top of those mountains will be completely dry so we won't have to be fiddling with glitter while we're assembling things. So that will be completely ready for us. We'll see you in the next video. 9. Making the Back Hills: All right, So now we're ready to die, cut the pieces for the hills. Now this particular dye cat has trees with it. We're going to be using the pieces without the trees. Because in this project I wanted to use this particular tree dicot. I kinda thought the two of them didn't necessarily create the look that I was wanting. So I'm leaving any of the pieces from this particular dicot that have the trees in it out. And we're only going to be using this piece with these pieces here. So I have one dark, one medium, and one light. And you'll be doing, and that one, I'm going to be doing the white in this one. I'm going to be doing this first one here in the dark color. And you can fit two of these hills within the same piece of paper. Which is why you only need one of each of the colors. So I've got one there. I flip it the other way and I can put my other piece. And you've got these tri doesn't want to do papers and want to come out. We'll just use the tool tip. Now. Do the weight. So just like the first video where we did the mountains, these pieces are all four by six. And there's a perfect size to get to each of the wider part. Suppose this one, you need to be a little bit more careful with taking out because there's some pieces there. Times the finer pieces there that we don't want to bend. This piece rate up here and do a little bit more traditional chap mirror. And typically while I'm done cutting these pieces here, they're gonna get tossed anyways. I just rip them off so they're not in my way. Just take this weight pisa here because I don't want that interfering with the current. And then again, we're being really careful with this little narrow way piece here. I've never actually turn it off, but I don't want to bend it or alternatively, too much in there. And now this PC, or if you're doing multiples of these, you can actually fit several of these within the light piece here. Again, for this we only need it to. So I've got one rate, fair? How does this rate here? And we'll do that one more time from other. They're nice and easy. All right, so I'll see you in the next video and we will assemble those and we will glitter them to take the cap off the glue. These ones are really easy to see exactly where they go on the dicots. But one thing you may not be able to see on your video is there's actually little indents rate on the dicot. So you can actually see if you're new to any of these videos that have several pieces that layer together. This particular one has little indents on there. So you can see exactly where each of those pieces goes. And you're gonna wanna make sure you have some glue on that little white strip there. Is if you forgot to put glue on it, it's not going to sit down and write like to glue this part on my mat here. Because then if any glue goes on there, it just wakes up super easy. Now, we're going to be late for herpes. The spinless corner. And I actually got this moved a little bit. It doesn't actually have that space there. But for what we're doing, I'm going to be adding, I'm going to be attaching this one here onto this side, so we're not going to need that part anyways. Typically, if I'm not filming, I'm a little bit more careful when I am doing pieces together, as well as if it's the first time I'm gluing dice together, I are dicots together typically. Slower, just because you're getting used to the dicot and where everything fits. Nice thing about using liquid blue with these is you can put the piece down and then you can shimmy it if it needs to be moved at all. It's nice and easy with wet glue to just move it around under it. So stucco. And you typically have like five seconds to do that. It's not something that you have a long period of time, but typically, five seconds is enough to see that something needs to be moved a little bit. All right, so just like the last one, I am going to be gluing. So the dicots together. So I'm going to take flip them over and I want the talk of the dicot to to meet doesn't really matter about the bottom. The bottom is covered by the hill in front of it. So it's the top that we're actually going to be seen. And even though the crease is covered by a tree, I don't want one hill going here and then the next part behind the tree going like that. I want it to look a little bit more natural and use my same tape. You could also use washi tape to glue these together or to take these together. The type of tape that you use doesn't really matter. You just want to make sure that we are taped together so that you'd have one piece that you're working on. Once again, I need to cut this at 63 quarters. I've got my guy kinda little bit off the edge here because this one's down a little bit. So I'm going to I want it to be straight on there. I don't want my type here to be and get that cut to the size that we need. Once again, this is not going to be used for this project, so it can set it aside, it can go on another card or something. And we're going to add a glitter to the top of the hills. And I like to use my distress collage medium for this as well because it's Matt. Um, you're not going to see the adhesive underneath there. It's only going to be there, tickle you the glitter on. And it's the glitter That's going to shine. It's not going to be not going to be interested. So again, I only did it at the top. I'm the type of person, especially with glitter. I love glitter, but I think less is more. So I think if it's just covered in glitter, that kinda takes away from the whole project. And since there's quite a bit going on between all the different layers and stuff like that. I don't necessarily need glitter on glitter on glitter. I want it to be just a little touch, but not overly. So while it's still wet, you can see exactly where the glue is, the bluest coffee, but that does reduce as it's drying. So I'm going to set that aside to dry so that by the time we were ready to assemble our diorama, it is completely dry as well. I will see you in the next video where we're going to be doing this heel here, it's going to be basically the same as the hell that we just did, but we're only going to be doing two layers. And this layer here is going to be the lighter color as well. So I'll see you in that one. 10. Making the Front Hills: All right, So the second hill, like I said, is going to be the same as the other one, but we're only going to use this white layer. And the one behind we're not going to use this layer here in front. Because the very front of our diorama, we're going to put some texture paste in there for some snow. So there's no point in having this here. Most of it's going to get covered anyways with the texture painting with the trees. So we're going to leave that completely out. So once again, I need two of each of these pieces and a piece of paper shifted. They are similar. But that C select stick it on top of my head. Maybe a statically in here right now. It one it keeps wanting to keep shifting with my heading plate. So if that ever happens, what you can do here, take your die, just a tiny little piece of tape. It doesn't need to be mentioned, it doesn't need to be the entire thing, but that's going to be enough to hold it right on that diet. So a little cup where I want it to cut. And then I can toss that piece of tape and that little bit out. And we go, we've got that piece of that and then we're going to hit the weight. Most of the times with this, the pieces that I'm cutting out are big enough. So if it does shift a little bit, it doesn't make a difference. But that one is a little bit close and if I had left it shifted, this would have been even shorter. And then it was wanting to cut out to take a small piece over here, a white piece of card bill. It reflects that fly. There we go. We've got the two pieces cut out there. I will see you in the next video and we will assemble them and we will go to them. So obviously, this assembly is exactly the same as the last till. The only difference is there is only two layers instead of the three layers. Making it slightly simpler. Actually. Let's do this. You could also take some strips of weight card sock and just tear them to create natural looking hills as well. It's something that I often do on projects as well. I just particularly like this dicot. And I get how it has the extra detail of the different colors in it which you wouldn't necessarily get if you were sharing out card stock. Alright. We've got those two glued together. I'm going to take them and I'm going to do something in it to attach and they're attached to. And what you may not have noticed in you're going to see you this right here is the blue piece that I was using was actually a scrapped. So it's slightly shorter than the white piece, which is totally fine because this is completely covered anyways, it's not going to make a difference. And really you, once you've you might have noticed it had, had I not to turn that around. So I have those kinds. Now. When I cut these hills, I have measured from this site in and cut there. I don't wanna do the same thing because I don't want to hills that are exactly the same profile. So for this one I'm going to measure from this side and then cut in so that I have two hills that are, have a little bit profile. So it's less obvious that you're using the same data. So I need my tremor, not my steak shot. I'm going to measure from this side, six and three-quarters. I'm going to cut this one. And this piece here is a little bit shorter. But once again, we're going to be putting some texture paste in here. So anything that is not covered is going to be covered in texture paste anyways. So it will be totally fine. And you're never even going to know that that one was shorter? Once again, a little bit a goo and I typically just put it on the top part of the weight. Here we go. Here, tap the first start to get the excess glitter That's not sticking to elude to fall off. The extra flew in your container. And now I've got two hills here, but have different profiles. So when this one goes on top of this one, You're not going to necessarily notice as obviously that is the same die just done in two different ways. And again, we're going to have a tree covering those seams. So those won't be obvious as well. All right, so I'll see you in the next video. Next step is a cutting some trees. 11. Diecutting the Trees: All right, so our next tip is to guide for dicot some trees and I'm using this particular dye here. You could use whatever three die you'd like. I am cutting two sets out of a darker shade of green and one step out of a lighter shade of green. And again, I chose my greens after doing the sky because then I could choose from the mica powder that I was using, what shade of green I liked best with it. So these pieces of card stock, if you're using this die, there are actually four and a quarter. Why? Because for was not quite enough. And even though for some of the layers, the bottoms are cut off, I wanted to make sure that I have the full dicot done with this so that I wouldn't have a cut-off, bought them to my tree or cutoff documentary. So this particular one wants to come up nice and easily, but you see how we have all those little bits in there. This is the answer to that. So rubbing this little brush on the backside of your die, those bits followed. You could, if you wanted to take a dike pick and go in each of those holes, Let's see if there's any less each of those holes to pick them out using a tool and one like that, it makes the job so much easier. Typically, I don't do it on top of the plate like that. Typically, I will have the dy and the brush rate on top of my garbage can. So those, all those little bits go right into the garbage. But if I did that, then you wouldn't necessarily see all the bits that came out of there. And again, I could use my GI picked to poke that out. I typically do that because while I do that, some of the pieces come out as well. And you know that any frustration, hello, Let's get rid of, get rid of some frustrations. You definitely want to be doing this between each and every dicot though, because if you leave some of those pieces in there, it does affect the dye cutting. If you get too many in there, it actually won't die hat or just class that shape into your dicot. So you wanna make sure that you clean your die between each and every one column. This is the last one. And some of these scraps, you can save them because, I mean, you could still fit a dicot or something in there. You can absolutely save them. For another project. I will clean that die out later. One thing you must do before we start to assemble our diorama is you want to make sure that each and every little bit is stuck in your dicot here is poked out. Now for this, you can't really use this because it needs some in East the stability of the die to poke through the hole to be able to poke it out. So it's not really meant for working on your actual paper dies. It's meant to do that on your own. That'll dyes to help take those pieces out. And most of these just Pope rate out super easy once you poke that little Ditech through them, the piece just falls out. Sometimes some of them need a little bit extra help, but usually it's pretty pretty quick, easy, and painless. But you'll definitely wanted to have this done before you start putting things together because nothing worse than being on a roll assembling something and all of a sudden you have to fulfill it's a little different pieces out of a die. And again, if you do them altogether, you can collect all those little bits all at once and then toss them away all at once. And then this will just be ready for you when you need it. And so I glittered all of the hills. I didn't glitter my trees if you wanted to at this point, is when I would take that same glue out, the same glitter and glitter them. I thought there was enough sparkle with just just having it on the mountains. But if you wanted to, you absolutely could go in glitter your trees as well. Personal choice, you decide whether you want to do that or not. I've got to clean my die here because I always like to have all those bits out for the next time I'm using it. But this tool really makes it super easy to get all those pieces out and then squeeze. There we go. All right, We will see you in the next video. Next one we're going to start to die cutting the pieces for our snowman. 12. Making the Snowman: Alright, so now we're ready to die. Fat are pieces for our snowman. And typically what I like to do is I like to get all my card stocks ready. And I like to put my pieces with the pieces with the card stock pieces that I am going to die, cut them out of. So but I know I have on my card stock hold and ready to go. All right, so this is the snowman that I am doing for this project. You could do a difference no matter it really doesn't matter which one you do. And once again, if you happen to be using a cricket, you could likely find an SVG for the snowman that you're wanting to do for your project. Just choose whatever one you love. What I like about this particular dye is rather than pointing at this one through here. And I'll finish what I'm saying here. Rather than having each one of these cool pieces cut and having to, trying to save, having to apply each one of those. We have a black piece and then we have the piece that we're cutting out and white. So it's automatically cut out. It's going to save you a ton of time and frustration. So I've got my black piece here. I typically just wrote that piece off there because it's going to be covered with white anyways. And there's no point in trying to glue that sliver together to me because it's just it's just not. If you want to glue the black or the white on top of the black bear, you don't actually see the black. So that's why I figured it makes no difference to me. I see how all of those pieces for the buttons and for the eyes, it cut it with this white piece here. So the one I go and put my black piece underneath it. It's all completely done. Love that they thought that through enough so that you don't have to sit there fiddling with each one of those pieces. Plus my little Ditech into the basket here and put them away in a minute. So I've got my hat edit this piece here. The one thing is there's a little tiny strap for on top of your hat. And I want that cut out of my, this is the piece that we did our texture with for our scarf. With the excess from the what I want to say with the excess from excess card stock and the colors that we did our background sky in. So I'm going to cut the pieces for my scarf out of that. And I'm also going to cut that little thin strip rate in here that goes on top of my hat. There we go. And I've got my pieces cut right here. You could assemble them as you're going if you so choose. I typically prefer to just cut them and then assemble them all at once. And that way I can put my orange me, we can read off of the die there. Now we have to move my decay machinery it out of my way in order to do the gluing them are one piece for a carrot. This particular dye has two pieces to create the carrots. And last but certainly not least, is the snow man's arms. I'm cutting that this little craft paper here. And it actually has a bit of a wood grain texture to it, which is not at all going to be seen when it's put together. I just like the idea of it. Here we go. We've got one arm here, second arm right there, and then let us get rid of it. All right, So assembling the snowman, let's do them all at once. I'm going to glue this weight piece on top of the black. Don't need that angle we want in there because it's not going to anything because they ripped it off. The first time I tried assembling the snowman, I actually tried to glue that weight on top of the black and I didn't like it. That's why I stopped doing that and decided to just written out like a piece off their little sash for the head, for, for the pat go. The top part of the scarf is just gives it a little bit of extra texture and glue it to the right spot. And then this little piece, top piece for the carrot. And there's actual indent rate on the larger of the carrot pieces shows you exactly where this goes. Which is always helpful. Alright, so I've got a little bit there. Ready to go. I'm going to take some weathered wood oxide ink and I'm just thinking the edges. That's just going to give my snowman a little bit of dimension to them. And typically I'd be a little bit more careful than I am. I'm going a little bit too fast. I'm getting a little bit more of the oxide and then I really want, I'm only doing it to the white pieces so it doesn't go on all of the pieces for the snowman, just the white pieces. But I think it gives them a little bit of dimension, a little bit of shadow, a little bit less flat than just having a snowman binds up. All right, now he's ready to assemble. Super easy. We will over the back. This time I definitely go on a little sliver. Now glue the scarf. And this will indent on the side. So it tells you, basically shows you exactly where on the next week that goes. Let's do is current news smooth so we can push it down quite enough for it to actually glue in place. For the hat, I only need glue on this little curved part here. Go and I will typically I'm not gonna do it right this second. I'll typically hold it down like this for a few seconds so that it glues onto the second piece as well. That may stay or it may not have been enough time. It may poke up and goes here. This one goes behind. So I'll typically put let's move to that hand. Well, I was trying to lift him up there. And I'd rather move this then try to glue that little bit on. So I have them on my craft mat. And then I just play some more. I think I would like him to go. There we go. And now, last but certainly not least, add a little bit of the glitter. I only add it to around the light parts. And you can see my nose, they're moving. I wait for the glue from assembling him to dry to do this. But I haven't waited quite long enough because I'm trying to do this in the same video. So I put it around the outside parts that you can see on the top layer as well as the bottom player. Once I have preclude there, I'm going to dump the glitter on it, tap the excess off, and make good. And I will set him aside to dry. If you like the cutest snowman ever, you could even put some glue in there and glittered the stones for his mouth and his eyes. Or you can put Glossy Accents in their crackle accents or whatever to give it a different texture, I'm leaving them as is because I liked them the way they are. But I can piece this the cutest little thing ever. And I think with this we've got all of our pieces ready and we will jump to the next video where we start to assemble our whole diorama and it all starts to come together. 13. Assembling our Diorama: All right, so now that we have over pieces assembled, Let's get ready to put it together. Now if you want to make the one with the emboss stores without the lighting, you would simply start by gluing this flat down and then you would layer the other pieces exactly the same as the lit version. I'm going to show you how to do the live version just because little bit of technique to putting the lights or the stars in. Now, these lights that I have here are actually just from our local Dollar Store. I ordered a pair of tiny light or a set of tiny lights in September to do this. And he was still on order. So rather than delay this project any longer, I wanted to keep going with it. So I just got a set from the dollar store and we'll carry on now before you put your tiny lights in and get too far ahead, make sure you put batteries and turn them on, make sure that they work properly. You'll notice that I put some double-sided tape in there just to glue the lights down, just don't basically hold them in place. And what I'm doing there doesn't need to be tidy because none of this is going to be seen. I'm just tacking the lights down so that they're scattered evenly throughout the background. I don't want to have a bunch of lights in one spot and then blank space and then numbers. So I will finish this and the variant that is done. So like I said, it doesn't need to. The main thing that I was focusing on is making sure that the individual lives and it's easy to see exactly where their lights are because there's a little book baldness to the where the lights are. I just want them scattered around. I don't want them all in one spot. I don't want to have a time in one spot and not in another. So I have my dicot sky with the gold bellum on the back. I have some foam tape on the back of it. Now the foam tape I have in about a half an inch wide. And because I didn't want to block that much of the dicot stars. I cut it in half and glued it to the back. And I wanted to give them some dimension behind where the stars were because I wanted to make sure that there was space for those lights. I didn't want this to be super super lumpy. And so I only put the adhesive around the edges. I don't need to have it in the center because I don't want to block out the light. I'm also going to put some strips of tape and the bottom here so that as I'm layering the different layers, it stays dimensional. Alright, so that's good. Next step is to add my mountains. I think. I'm going to put them at both great there. So I want to make sure to take the backing. Hey, So the particular foam tape that I bought is actually fairly thin. And for this particular project, I wanted it to be a little bit thicker. So I ended up layering them on top of each other. And I also ended up making sure that I have all my foam tape on the back of my pieces ready to go. So it wasn't fiddling with that while I was videotaping rage about there. Now, as I'm building these layers, I want to make sure to build this foam part as well. I wanted keep building up and you can use more foam tape than this if you need to. For what I'm doing, I found this to be enough. I'm using the tape because for the size of these pieces, it's a lot easier to deal with. Then a bunch of dots. If you only have some popped up, that's totally fine. You can absolutely use them. But once I almost forgot to add my trees, Let's put that on the side. So taking one of my dark set of dicot trees of scissors was around here somewhere a second ago. I want to use it this year, but we're sharper. And I'm going to cut them apart. And they don't need to put the glue all the way up to the top because somehow this is going to be on top of this part here. So I'm just going to hide that scene. And then because I don't necessarily want just one tree in there, I'm going to take these guys and I'm going to put them on this side. Now. I want to put them so that it looks like they're coming off of my diorama. So I'm going to take that edge and I'm going to cut it so that it will fit nice and close to the edge. There we go. And I'm using the same blue that I used to stick it together, stick with my dicots together earlier on, I think I'll do is I'll leave the cap off so that I'm not constantly taking it, putting it on and taking it off. Now I don't necessarily have to wait for that to dry because as I'm layering things up, it will end up drawing upside-down right there. And now I'm going to use my lighter set of trees. Only reason for that is I don't want to have a little bit of color variation. The tweet between the trees. That guy off the bear. And I think I'm going to cut this right here. Works out that that goes rate on top of that. And I only know that because I've already made this a couple times, so I know where to do my cuts FOR loops for doing this the first time. Obviously, you wouldn't lay it down and make sure that you're cutting in the right spot before you actually do the thing. And then I'm going to take this and put them in here. And you can see that I'm not putting to you over the entire thing. I'm only putting glue basically down the center of my dicot. It doesn't matter if any of these pieces flip out because they're just done that making it look a little bit more like a natural tree. Now, I'm going to put this piece on here. Much for that, take a super, super sticky. And so for that I'm going to take some tape and add it to this one here so that I've got it at the right dimension. Here we go. This particular one is going to be towards the bottom. Here we go. Perfect. Now I've got my other trees here. I am going to attempt to them. And I do end up rounding that pieces so that it's not straight edges that don't work and natural, I want to kind of keep it with a lookup, the Ditech piece there. Okay, Fair. Cover up that see him there. This one on the corner. So because we've taken the time to dicot everything before assembling. This takes no time at all comes together super, super easily. Now I'm going to put my snowman there and I only have to put glue down that bottom part because it's only being glued to this here. It doesn't, it's raised above that, so it does get new there. And you could if you wanted, put some foam taken there and have the snowman pop up from there. But I didn't necessarily want to. Alright, so that is glued in place. I'm going to set that or leave that to dry for a second or a couple minutes. And then we're going to add a little bit of texture paste to the front here and make some snow down here. 14. Adding Texture Paste & Glitter: All right. So it's had a few minutes to dry. So I'm going to just put in some texture pacing the bottom here. Just to kind of give it some snowy ground. Fill in any holes down below the dicots. Once I have all this texture paste in place, I'm going to put some of the same glitter that we used on top of our dicots to make it move sparkly snowy. Just going to tie everything all in together. My initial laying down of the texture paste, I'm not super, super careful and just getting a 0 in there as much as I want. And then I'll take my knife here and I'll smooth it out and make it a little bit smoother. No. I'm not necessarily wanting it completely smooth. Er doesn't look that I am going for. I like a little bit of texture in there. But I don't necessarily want it to pursue for texture, right? That is good enough to try to close your bottle so that it doesn't all dry out. And then while that texture cases the wet, I'm going to pour glitter on top of it, tap off the excess and go. But the excess of the glitter back in my container here. And I will let that drive. Here's a little bit of glitter that instructed some wet texture pace on the side of the frame, but I will wait for that to dry and then I will take a stiff bristle brush and brush that off. I have some of that double-sided tape on the back of my battery pack. And I'm going to glue it to the bottom of the frame with the double-sided tape. Make sure to put the double-sided tape on the side opposite the cover to your batteries because you want to make sure that you can change your batteries. I'm leaving the cord as is. You could put a piece of card stock. I'm talking here to cover it if you want, but it's going to be a little bit bumpy because there is some bulk to this chord. Or you can take some like maybe tape or whatever. I'm doing that kind of matches and cover it, but I'm going to leave it as is. And there is our finished project, since I've got a great site for the lights. And they are all lit up. And let cubed. So cute. And then there's the nonlinear one. Like I said, neither one is right or wrong, it's personal preference whenever you like. And I make that addition of the little bits of light in there and I liked the little bit of reflectiveness from the northern lights as well. 15. WD10 Thank You: Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I hope you enjoy making your winter genre diorama as much as I enjoyed creating the cash T of 11. The next one.