Making Dioramas

The Tawhiti Museum uses many models in its displays – from ‘life-size’ figures, the size of real people The Tawhiti Museum uses many models in its displays – from ‘life-size’ figures, the size of real people – right down to tiny figures about 20mm tall - with several other sizes in between these two.

Why are different sizes used?
To answer this, look at the Turuturu Mokai Pa model. The figures and buildings are very small. If we had used life-size figures and buildings the model would be enormous, bigger than the museum in fact – covering several hectares! So to make a model that can easily fi t into a room of the museum we choose a scale that we can reduce the actual size by and build the model to that scale – in the case of the Turuturu Mokai Pa model the scale is 1 to 90 (written as 1:90) – that means the model is one ninetieth of real size – or to put it another way, if you multiply anything on the model by 90, you will know how big the original is. A human fi gure on the model is 20mm – if you multiply that by 90 you get 1800mm - the height of a full size person. So as the modeler builds the model, by measuring anything from life (or otherwise knowing its size) and dividing by 90 he knows how big to model that item – this means the model is an accurate scale model of the original – there is no ‘guess work’...

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