I'm not sure why, but I've always wanted to make a video game diorama that incorporated standing bamboo. And, when I think of scenes that reflect that, my first inclination tends to be Jubei Yagyu's homestead from SNK's Samurai Shodown, but that'd entail fabricating a heck of a lot of those plants, not to mention his house and water well, so I chose a simpler location from the first level of Sega's 1991 portable Game Gear version of Ninja Gaiden instead.

Speaking of which, it strikes me as more than a little odd that Sega would license Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden intellectual property when they already had their own successful ninja video game franchise, Shinobi. That'd be like Disney paying to use Warner Brothers' Daffy Duck cartoon character instead of just using their own iconic Donald Duck instead.

Rather than my usual approach of using the game's graphics for this type of art project, I made everything myself from scratch. That's mostly because I was (1) too cheap to pay a dollar a page for color print-outs and (2) too lazy to rip and edit the game's sprites/backgrounds in order to create the sheet of digital art assets that I'd be printing in the first place.

*****

Materials:
Cardboard from a cereal box, lined notebook paper, newsprint, brown paper from a grocery bag, white glue,
super glue, sand/dirt, embroidery floss, acrylic paint, ink, and transparent plastic sheeting (base for Ryu only).

Dimensions:
6.1 cm (2.4") wide x 5.8 cm (2.3") deep x 5.4 cm (2.1") high.

Time:
Three days: September 5th-7th, 2015.