This series of dioramas was a unique project for Fritz’s Railroad Restaurant in Crown Center, Kansas City. Fritz’s is a burger restaurant built in 1954, and the feature of their restaurant is a restaurant-wide railroad and train delivery system for the food. The booths in the restaurant have 9-inch deep window wells that contain dioramas of Kansas City landmarks and a toy train that passes on the tracks and through tunnels in front of them.

Old Painted Dioramas

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The previous window dioramas were painted by set builders and were collecting dust (literally) and looking dated. As part of a restaurant-wide update, I was tasked to design the new window dioramas.

New Illustrated Dioramas

I spent a summer day driving all around Kansas City, to each of the landmarks with my camera. I tried to be conscious of framing each location similarly, and from the same approximate distance.

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Then I brought the photos into Photoshop, changed out the sky for a fun illustrated one, and created an illustrated effect to apply to each of the photos.

Bearing in mind the popularity of this restaurant with children, I wanted to make sure the colors were brighter than real life and the shapes recognizable. After this, I created dielines for the main shapes so that they could be printed and cut and cast shadows against the background.

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One thing I added from the previous iteration of the dioramas, was the sign above each landmark, including the name of the landmark and the year it was built. I thought this would appeal to children and Kansas City tourists especially to learn. The sign hangs down from the top of the diorama. The text extrudes in places, casting interesting shadows and keeping with the dimensional nature of this project.