Cardstock, woodgrain, braille and... rivets?

[PhilB]

I've been working on this half-timbered house for something like a month now, and I'm up to interior furniture, doors and stairway But what I'm really writing about this time is rivets. I'm sure some of you lads have far more clever ways to simulate rivets, say for door hinges or door bracing, but I ran across something I'd never seen before and thought I'd mention it here.

For cardstock I've been using 1mm-thick bank calendars and 0.2mm-thick (approximately) medicine boxes. The other day I noticed that all the medicine boxes had a notice in braille on one of the sides, probably the name of the stuff. I looked at that braille message - nicely embossed domes molded into the cardboard - and thought that I'd been missing out on an opportunity for ready-made rivets for ages!



A few hours later, I'd done up a batch of furniture, using the power-flex gel version of loctite superglue, and you can see here on the right the doors with rivets either on their hinges or on the cross-pieces.



The other thing I did for the first time (but which I'd heard about on some youtube video) was scribing a wood grain directly into cardstock. I'd been using an old ball-point pen to scribe board divisions for quite some time, but here I also used a sharp, sturdy pencil to draw a woodgrain with enough pressure to leave deep grooves in the cardstock surface (bank calendars, again). As it was an experiment, I only did the tabletops, not the benches or doors or stairway, but I think in future this'll be my go-to method for woodwork.



Here's the entire collection of furniture after 3-4 coats of craft paint:
1) a dark wash of burnt umber mixed with a little medium brown (half paint, half water)
2) streaks of light brown (medium brown mixed with white and a little ochre)
3) streaks of medium brown, unmixed
4) some pieces required a bit of touch-up with the original colors. And in fact, I think I missed a few edges all the same.



In this close-up of the doors you can see my hasty paintjob on the rivets. The top two doors are to retrofit openable doors to the interior of the ground floor of my half-timbered house. It's a bit cramped in there, so I knew the doors had to be pre-painted and ready to glue in place. The rivets at the far end of the hinge are braille, while the grouping of four rivets on the hinge itself are simply painted on. The bottom two doors are intended to add a backdoor to the ground floor even though I neglected to plan for one when assembling the walls. They are in thin medicine-box cardstock, and I cut the strips for the crospieces and diagonal bracing so as to include a maximum number of braille bumps. I only had to paint in 2 or 3 rivets where none existed to get more-or-less uniform results.



Most of these bits were pretty straightforward. But a few took careful planning, like the stairway. Even then, I had to revise things along the way, having made a few mistakes in the planning stage. Perhaps the biggest thing when assembling miniature furniture is to remember to take into account the thickness of the cardstock when planning which bits will overlap which other bits. Here's the unpainted stairway with my hasty sketch of a plan:



And here's the fully painted version, with an added non-functioning door which could lead down to the basement, or even a full-fledged dungeon...



I'm really glad to have scribed boards and board ends before assembly, but really should have done a woodgrain like I did for the tabletops - much more convincing than simply painting on a woodgrain. But if you don't look too close, it's passable. The doorknob is a pinhead and the frame around the door is more thin card. I considered simply painting the doorframe onto the stairway, but the slight relief from the card frame makes it more believable as a door.

Next, after some sunny hols in the Yucatan, will be beds, chests, windows for the upper floor of the half-timbered house, and then... ivy. So I've got a few questions for you lads:
- Does the 1mm-thick cardstock work for tables and benches? It's about half the thickness of the resin furniture from Dwarven Forge, but on balance I suspect the 1mm-thick cardstock is closer to scale for boards. It does still look rather flimsy in comparison, though. Should I have doubled the thickness of my card prior to assembly?
- I know there are many methods for portraying climbing ivy on the walls and roof of houses, but I'm thinking about using string for the vine base and ordinary white glue and some leftover clump foliage for the leaves. I've seen some work with birch seed cases (lovely leaves!) but don't know where I could find any round these parts. Any suggestions beyond clump foliage and flocking?

[roadskare63]

Nicely done!!!.....They all look marvelous!....Love the "cellar door" in the steps.

[tomrommel1]

very nice wood effect indeed

[PhilB]

Card does seem to make very adequate wood, especially when you go to the extra trouble of scribing a wood grain into it prior to painting. Otherwise the paint has to do all the work.

I'm still concerned that the 1mm-thick card makes for too flimsy a structure on the tables and benches. I'm obviously not going to redo this batch, but if anyone shares my gut feeling on this, I might try to locate thicker card in future, or glue two thicknesses of card together, for future batches of furniture.