Dioramas on Thi's things

3318 Left Behind

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I made a blogpost about 1980’s Playmobil space robots and how cool they were. I kinda teased a custom painted robot, mainly because it was already half made. For month I would say, half painted and put aside on my never-ending pile of things to complete.

Paint, clay and a cloudy weekend

Back when I started this collection and small obsession, I stumbled upon a Playmobil toy photographer (I can’t find him anymore, I’ll update this post eventually) who had five or six of the can-bots in a scenery, and one of them was of a nice metallic green. Turns out it was a (very well made) custom paint of a regular robot. Obviously I had to try myself.

By the Magic of buying two Robotitrons for cheap on vinted, I started customizing mine. My plan was to have it dark green and gold. However, after base-coating all the pieces and painting the shell green, I put this project aside for months. Until now, I guess!

What sparked the reboot of this project was two things: a small squared piece of wood and a block of fimo-like clay that I got during big sales in a close hobby shop. I wanted to try my hand on clay for a while now without really getting along with it. I even bought a ton of tools and accessories, but never really used them.

So the first step was to create a lunar-looking scenery. Honestly not the hardest homework to start playing with clay. I quickly thought of a layout: two craters, my robot in the middle and some tracks behind.

I used rocks and various tools I had around to make nice lunar surface, with a ton of little craters. I obviously used the robot real wheels to create the tracks.

I ended up reworking a bith the craters, as they were too steep to my taste.

Details, and more isn’t better

Unfortunately (for this blog, good for me) I was too deep into this project to take pictures of the work in progress. I count on your imagination to fill the gaps.

Robot

I ended up painting over my green robot instead of removing the paint already applied on my previous attempt. And that was a great decision, the the dark green barely leaks through the newly applied dark blue, giving a nice depth. I stayed with the initial colors of the 3318 blue bot, but repainting everything. It ended up giving a more tangible and less toy-like appearance, which I really enjoy.

I added a bit of weathering, ripped one of its arms (no vintage robot harmed during the making of this Diorama, only a 2019’s Robotitron) and did some additional painting on some “technical” details.

Lunar scene

As the saying goes: the best is the enemy of the good.

I wanted to add too much things to the scene, and ended up kind of ruining it. Paint, glue, stones and dust made my scene looking not much like a lunar surface but more like a random dusty spot.

The final touch (I must admit I’m a bit proud of this one) was to add flour to my flooring, before permanently gluing it using clear varnish.

Finished model

Lore:

In late 1985, the last astronauts of the Playmospace program left the lunar surface, taking with them all the samples and data collected in this 5-years long space program. This model 3318 space companion unit was part of the last relief crew landing and was never fully activated.

When it was time to pack everything up into the shuttle, this 3318 was considered non necessary and as such was left behind, untouched and unmonitored.

Two decades later, a solar storm accidentally activated its circuits. Alone and cut off from terrestrial radio frequencies, this unit spent another decade wandering across the Moon’s surface, searching for its lunar base, that was long gone. During this time it lost a wheel and broke its left arm. It then inevitably fell short on battery, becoming, once again, an inanimated piece of equipment in a hostile world.

Domestic Ruins

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been almost two years since Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park. Life happened, Pnic and I moved, and the Extra Robots project was put to side. Until now?

The Blue-City park Diorama hasn’t left my display shelf and is still looking very good to my standards. Since almost the beginning of this journey, I had multiple diorama ideas, some like Blue-City Park being quite big and some being little one-off scenes, easier and faster to make. “Domestic Ruins” is one of those.

The plan was simple: let’s make a post-battle scene where one of our Extra Robots Jaeger lost the battle to a monster. Robot must be defeated, damaged and so must be the environment. I took inspiration from many epic Gundam Dioramas.

The build

Everything started with two things I had already with me: a clear plastic dome that was used to hold a lemon ice cream/sorbet and a building I had previously purchased for Blue-City Park but never used as the scale wasn’t quite right.

The cardboard disk was cut to size and I started digging through the plastic building to make room for my Robot.

I laid down some thick pieces of paper to create a bit of volume, which ended up not being visible at all, unfortunately. Using many little pieces of paper, I added some details, trying to give a more “destroyed city” look. I used my good old grounded-coffee + white glue to make dirt patches and called it a day.

In the meantime, I worked on the Robot itself. My plan was to have a gray and green city (I added some bushes, vines and trees, not shown here), so I went with a blue Robot to contrast as much with the scene as possible.

Of course, it has to be beaten down so I used my pliers on the robot at some places and used paint to mimic more damage. As you’ll see in the final results, I added even more damage later on.

Good old T-011 had seen better days.

Beauty shots

A quick side-project that took a week of sporadic work between my work hours.

Like the other project, it’s also published on extrarobots.wordpress.com, working as a central hub for this whole project.

Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Creeping nightmare at Blue-City Park is my biggest project to date.

Genesis

It all started back in 2022. Pnic and I were just finishing our kitbashathon project and were compulsively buying a 2006 series of Kinder-egg toys: the Extra Robots.

We had great plans in sight: making a cool-ass kaiju-robot diorama using those. We did a lot of planning, sketching and prepping maximize what we could achieve on a 4-days long stay of Pnic at my place.

Since this project is the first of (hopefully) a full series, we dedicated a little wordpress site to our crafting journey. As such, I won’t elaborate much here and link you to the full site at:

extrarobots.wordpress.com.

There you’ll find a full fledged tear-down of every step of the project, from the idea, prepping and of course, making.

Gallery

Close-ups

By night