For Christmas one year, I was gifted the amazing Creature from the Black Lagoon 1/6 Scale Figure from Mondo, the black and white “Silver Screen” variant. I love the design of Gill-man from the 1954 movie with its beautiful, segmented simplicity so, to try to honour this classic design, I decided to create a custom diorama for the figure to be in.

All my best horror figures are displayed in 13 inch by 13 inch cubes, arranged into a pyramid structure against my wall – what I call “The Pyramid of Horror”. To ensure such an enigmatic figure could stay within the spotlight, I challenged myself with keeping the diorama confined to the relatively small space within one of these cubes. I also was determined to maintain the black and white aesthetic; it is a black and white movie with the figure following suit so a true colour background would just look off. I knew that getting everything exact to a 1/6 scale would be complex and frustrating so I just ignored this ‘true to scale’ idiom – something that can clearly be seen in the below photographs of the finished model. Still as a first-time attempt at creating a diorama, the result is far beyond what I thought I possible when I launched into this task. I had a lot of fun creating it and am especially proud of my use of real driftwood gathered from a nearby beach to mimic trees and roots, lightly spray-painted white to keep the monochromatic colour-scheme.