Woodland ScenicsDiorama Kit, Mountain

Good assortment of scenery items.

These kits are really great places top start if you are interested in making terrain for wargaming or fantasy games using miniatures, railroad landscape &terrain or for dioramas. Each box is a "stand-alone" project, but I bought a number of these to get comfortable with concepts and to identify the materials I would need for larger scale terrain construction for wargaming. I built a practice river, to get the hang of it, then used the mountain-making kit to wrap my arms around building "shells" out of plaster cloth (mountains or hills), modeling rocks or outcroppings in those hills and adding water features (I now have a ten-foot mudular river in five 2' X 2' sections so I can change them around). I am not done, and have bought many of the products Woodland Scenics makes so I can keep making two-foot square modules to use on a "battlefield." I learned the techniques from the scene-a-rama kits. They teach you anything you need to use: Water features, hills, outcroppings, making & coloring rocks, detailing terrain with grasses or "flockings," trees and everything about them, bushes, undergrowth, vines and more.You will not stop with these kits unless you are doing a "one-off" school project. They are perfect for those, but it strikes me as such a pity to develop a skill and use it just once. I wish I had kids just to build stuff with regularly. If you do, my one parting piece of advice is to be aware that everything seems to have a drying time. From working with plaster cloth, to rock-making, to making rivers and ponds or painting under-coating, cementing grass in place or making trees, everything requires time to dry. If a child will be involved, line up three or four aspects of a project to take use of the full time dedicated to this. Actually, that's true if another adult is going to be involved in helping or working with you just for the joy of creation.I tried almost all of the kits Woodland Scenics makes and I recommend them all. They will teach you skills that will let you build a miniature world for toy soldiers, model trains or fantasy figures ... or any number of dioramas or school projects.Oh, I almost forgot. Their mountain dioramas can all be used to make volcanoes, for those looking to replicate that timeless school science project. Their website has instructions on how to build it and make it work.

Kit is great, however, it does NOT include the black base shown in the photo. My bad for not realizing this, as that was the part we needed. Wanted to make sure others didn't run into the same issue we did, assuming it was a full kit with the black base included, as that is NOT the case. We should have just ordered our own plaster & rock molds had we known this kit didn't have the base anyways.

This was a Christmas gift for my brother and also his most favorite gift. Did I mention he’s 27? He’s obsessed and wanted me to tell yall. Sorry I couldn’t get a picture.

I loved that this kit came with everything that we needed for designing and creating the landscape we envisioned for my sons school project, including the paper mache and castings. The only thing that was missing was a hard copy of the instructions in the kit. We had to scan the QR code and go online to find the kit and then print out the instructions. I felt like that would have been a big inconvenience for someone without the capability to print off the instructions themselves and it is advertised that the instructions are included in the kit. I liked that we didn’t have to follow a specific outline or grid for the landscape, so we had the freedom to mark out what we wanted it to look like and the placement of everything so that made it very versatile. It came with an abundance of materials we didn’t use but half (if even that) of the materials provided so we were able to save everything for a future project.

My forth time buying this kit. Im sure there are some who can knock this kit. There are pros and cons to everything. For the money this is a great starter kit. As a base for building a diorama, it can't be beat. As your building skill improves, the end results are limitless. Easy to use and versatile.Update; 12-31-23: Well my forth kit arrived missing parts. I contacted Amazon and for some reason their system will not allow them to act on fixing this issue. Each time I called, I am instructed to call back in a few days. No refund or replacement was provided.Update 01-02-04: Well, no results except more runaround from Amazon. Not only did this item arrived late, it was also missing pieces. Evidently the item was never scanned as received. But my Amazon phone app and the online site clearly show that he item was delivered. Every other time I ordered this item it arrived in an Amazon box. This one arrived unboxed and tape closed. Now I'm being told to wait another 48 to 72 hours to request support.

I've used Woodland Scenics products for model railroading for many years. This kit follows a long history of well thought out, detailed oriented, realistic scenery materials. It has a little of everything and it includes things like small spray bottles and the means for actually building the product shown. I love the scale of this, it allows you to focus your efforts on a small area which builds confidence and reduces the time it takes to actually see results. Great kit to get kids interested in scenery techniques, great for wargaming scenes and small dioramas. This opens the door to performing these techniques on a larger scale train layout. The Woodland Scenics website also has a number of video clinics which walk you through the steps necessary to achieve realistic scenery in a short period of time. Colors of all of these materials are spot on, muted and convincing.

I did buy additional trees ,animals and an additional pack so I could do the river etc …. However my son loved it as did I … more then enough to go around….