Creating a Ballroom Diorama: Part One of Two

Today’s discussion is going to focus on a couple of ways you can create a formal backdrop for your dolls. While, overall, I prefer more practical settings for my dolls (living rooms, kitchens, offices), every now and then you have to let them party it up! Plus, a ballroom setting is the perfect display for those girls with the enormous gowns and trains!

The first type of setting I created was a three-walled ballroom that required fairly minimal detail. What I wanted was a diorama for displaying my vintage (and later Silkstone) girls and guys that would showcase all the great gowns they had. (You will have to excuse the quality of the photos—I took them with my old camera, and had to scan them into the computer).

Since I didn’t have a diorama cabinet at the time, I used pressboard for the three walls, and a thick piece of plywood for the floor (it was heavy!). To create the illusion of a grand ballroom, I purchased a poster from allposters.com (making sure to choose the dimensions that would fit the size of diorama I wanted to create). For this particular scene, I bought “An Evening Soiree” by Jean Beraud. Even though it depicts a period scene, I thought that the opulent setting and the slight vagueness of the figures would still work well as a backdrop.


I liked that the poster I chose would create the illusion of a ballroom full of people, so that when I posed my dolls, they would seem to be in the foreground of a large crowd.


To begin, I glued the poster to the back wall of the three-walled diorama. Because there is so much gold and gilding in the poster, I painted each of the side walls gold. For the floor, I glued down red felt (even though the flooring in the poster is glossy wood). What I wanted to do was recreate some of the details of the poster in the 3-D diorama, in order to create the illusion of continuity. To do this, I chose a couple of elements to focus on—the red velvet curtains, the gold framed mirrors and the gilded tables under them (which you can’t really see well in the poster, due to the poor quality of the photos and the fact that there are a gazillion dolls in every photo!), and a couple of gilded chairs.

In this photo, you can see one of the velvet curtain treatments (I had one curtain on each of the side walls, as well as one mirror and one gilded table—note that you will be able to see the gilded tables in more detail later on in the discussion). The curtains were in four parts: the long velvet drapes, the velvet valance trimmed with red braided ribbon, white sheers underneath, and white patterned sheers that criss-crossed over top of the white sheers. Again, the idea was to replicate as closely as possible the curtains in the poster. Red sashes held the curtains back:



Another shot of the curtains:



And here is the mirror and the gilded table below (the mirrors are just picture frames spray painted gold, with “mirrored” cardboard inserted):



Finally, I placed a couple of chairs and a small bench (you can't see the bench--it was a Suzy Goose bench from the vanity set, and I glued a red/bold brocade to the seat) in the foreground, again replicating details from the poster. Overall, this diorama gave me a very authentic, very detailed-seeming setting for my girls!