A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Miniature Mother Model (Psycho)

Michelle and I were out shopping for art supplies a few weeks ago and ran across this very basic diorama kit. Just two walls and a floor, and we thought maybe we should try using it for our next diorama project.

Since it was only a few days until Mother’s Day, we thought we’d celebrate one of the creepiest moms in movie history, Mrs. Bates from Psycho. So we set up the base and made some temporary paper models to get the scale right.

Since the fruit cellar has a dirt floor, we mixed up some grout and glue and other goopy things to spread on our base as a paste that hardened. The blocky brick walls of the fruit cellar were created by carving channels in foam core and painting them to look like worn stone.

An as for that paint job, we decided we wanted our miniature version of the scene to have that same, eerie feel as the one in the movie. And that meant forgetting all about color, and painting it in washes of black and grey. That meant Mother too.

Every part of Mother, from her sculpted slippers to her patterned dress, her solitary chair and her withered skin, all of it was planned and executed to look like a black and white photo or film. And even though you wouldn’t necessarily see her face the way the original scene was filmed — with her back to the camera — I took great pleasure in sculpting a corpse with a gaping, ghastly grin that only a doting son like Norman could love.

We used basswood strips and tiny props on the reverse side of the diorama to make it look like the back side of a flat you’d see in use on a Hollywood movie set. And, since this part of the diorama was ‘the real world’ we rendered it in full color.

If you want to see the whole process, as well as our 37-second tribute film, Psycho V, you can click on the link below.