Sea Dioramas, Animals and Accessories

Here are four of the toys, you can see the huge difference in scale between the whales and the other animals.

The octopus and sperm whale work well together and look pretty cool.

Shark and octopus together is pretty cool too.

Octopus and big starfish is interesting, octopus will eat starfish, but not often.

Hammerhead shark and a ray.  I think it is a sting ray but I am not certain.

Sea lion with the two plants that come with the set.  The bases are kind of weird they look like they should be weighted and put at the bottom of a fish tank.  They look like alien plants to me.

The diorama set comes with a little bag of sea glass.  Sea glass is glass that has been worked on by the action of the water and the sand.  Over time it gets smooth and opaque.

A bag of sand, useful for creating a sea floor.
 

Ocean Life

These are the animals that come with the set, a sea turtle.  He is about 1/32nd scale.

This shark is about 4 inches long, about 1/32nd scale.

Hammerhead shark, also about 4 inches long, also about 1/32nd scale.

 A rather nice octopus, I like the eyes.  He is about 3 inches long, and since he is an octopus he could work for GI Joe size figures to as small as 1/72nd size figures.

The star fish is rather large and would only be useful for a GI Joe size figure.

Sea lion, about 1/32nd scale.

This ray works for about 1/32nd to GI Joe size figures.

The whale is only about 3 inches long, so very small.

The sperm whale is the size of the blue whale, which is very small.

The dolphin is about 1/32nd scale.

The figures were fully painted, no flash, and durable soft plastic.
 

Ocean Background

I got a photo box on Amazon with some animals recently.

It is ocean scenes, with sea life figures.

The brown is the table that I set this up on.

It's a cubic box with photos for both sides, back, and top and bottom with water or seascapes.

This is the water surface.  I think it would work well placed on the table top as the water surface, particularly in tropical areas.

Looking up at the underside of the oceans surface.

The ocean bottom is sandy and rocky.  These kinds of diorama kits can make set ups easier to make and look better.  A Hot Wheels submarine, a few frogmen, a sunken ship would all look good if they were using this background.
 

Small Building Upgrades

This is a dollar store building.  I like these buildings because they are cheap and can be used for a variety of purposes.

The castings are usually good, but the paint jobs are typically marginal.

So a little bit of paint can make a big improvement on how these look.

For less than $2 this is a pretty good building for wargaming.  

Here is a small group of them that I have put together over the last few weeks, these have all had a little bit of new paint and I think it makes them look a lot better.

On of the first things I do is color in the windows, usually with gloss black paint.  Sometimes semi-gloss and sometimes with yellow to simulate the light are on inside.

That black window paint really defines the look of the windows which really improves them right away.

Usually I keep the colors the same, but if I have more than one of the same building, then I often repaint them so they look very different from one another.  Then a little touch up on the plant life, rocks, and other bits and they are done.