Welcome to the Cantina

I recently completed a project that had been a goal, in the back of my head, for years.  It took three months, many, many hours of hard work, and involved a lot of struggle, but I think I successfully completed it.  If you have the same or similar goal, you have come to the right place.

I've never been a diorama maker, aside from a couple of Lego projects, and I never was any good at building models when I was a kid, especially painting them.  However, when I was finishing my book on the Star Wars Cantina, THE CANTINA COMPENDIUM (which has undergone a major revision for the second edition), I began to research the various dioramas that people had made, and I was really stunned at what was out there.  One in particular inspired me quite a bit, and made me wonder how "doable" the project was.  

Then, I began to read up on the techniques, as I was wondering exactly how some of these magic tricks were accomplished.  There are several excellent websites out there to be found, and several of them are even Star Wars-specific, and I will include these in the links as Resources.  However, there wasn't anything that was completely dedicated to what I was trying to do!

Since 1995, when Kenner began to make Star Wars figures again, I have been stockpiling Cantina residents.  Now, it's the present day, where the now-Hasbro still occasionally releases a character we didn't have, or a remake that improves on the previous version.  As I had kept up with all of the insanity for 17 years, I thought the time was right.

Luckily, I took a lot of photos along the way, and my plan for this blog is to provide exactly the kind of resource I was looking for and couldn't exactly find.  Hopefully, I can share with you some of my trials and tribulations, and save you some heartache.  If my experiences don't answer a particular question, in the Links, I can point you in the direction of a site that can. I was going to make an extra chapter in the next version of my Cantina book, and I quickly realized that to document it properly, and go into detail fully, would comprise an entire book in itself.

So where do we begin? With the finished product, of course! I recently borrowed a fancy camera to try and take some detailed photos of my finished project...