Lead Adventure Forum
Other Stuff => Workbench => Topic started by: Leftblank on 07 January 2016, 06:03:45 PM
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Busy with Linka (uncle of Hirstarts) and foam. I glued Linka wall pieces on foam and created a horror lighthouse with zombie wall statues for Frostgrave. Full blog with tutorial here: http://amsterdam6shooters.nl/node/569 (http://amsterdam6shooters.nl/node/569)
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Cool write up. It's nifty to see comparison thoughts between different methods like that. Needs bigger pics though. I kept trying to click the thumbnail-sized pics to see a full sized pic, but there wasn't any. Can't really get a good look at the construction details you're talking about in the wee pics.
Not sure about the printed faces. Part of it is the size of the "windows" doesn't feel natural on a tower like this, and part of it is the relative size and cropping of the faces. The end result is they kinda look more like movie theater banner posters than anything else.
EDIT: Apparently they are full sized pics, but for whatever reason the blog page is constraining them to display as thumbnail sized. You have to right-click and select "view image" to see them proper sized. That's bad web design, and should be fixed to display as thumbnail links to full sized pics.
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Tnx for the comments. I wrote this small tutorial more as a how-to than as a showcase blog so the pics are relatively small. I'm trying to find a building modelling technique which is easier than the difficult to connect Linka castings, quicker than endlessly carving brick patterns in foam, more 'brick' than plastered foam and cheaper than plasticard. I never built DIY-houses before so it's a quest. I'll add some better, daylight pics.
About the faces: I want this tower to be a bit bombastic centerpiece of a Frostgrave table. So the faces are not meant to be 'pictures of people looking out of a window', or 'paintings in a frame pinned on a wall'. I just hope that they give the impression of weird, distorted wall paintings on a gothic tower in a cthulhu-esque abandoned frozen city.
The stone frame changed the original proportions: for example the hairline of The Joker is now invisible. Without the stone frame the pic proportions were better but the tower as a whole looked less 'goth'. Just didn't want to redo the prints. Your observation is correct, I might have been impatient. The building process however was educational (and so is your comment). Tnx again!
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Having larger pics helps a lot even (or especially) with a "how-to" as it illustrates the things you're describing and clarifies questions the reader might have. They don't have to be huge, it's just that thumbnail sized pics don't really allow the reader to make out much at all. The pics are good once you do the right click and view thing, and the size they're displayed at on the blog is good as thumbnails, they just need to be tied together as clickable thumbnail links. Currently it's a little weird as they the size they display at looks deceptively just like clickable thumbnails, and is also very bandwidth inefficient/wasteful as the page has to load all the full sized pics even though it's only displaying them as what might as well be thumbnails.
Re: the brickwork efficiancy issue, maybe make some texture stamps? Say, a 2"x2" square of negative brick pattern in epoxy that you can use to rapidly "carve" an entire side by stamping it into the foam.
Since the faces are meant to be murals, maybe troll through DeviantArt or Tumbler image archives for fantasy art (Tumblr image blog archives are amazing sources of aggregated reference pics). Medieval painting doesn't resemble photos, and the further back you go, the more sort of orthographic and abstracted it gets (though even the later Renaissance stuff isn't anything that could be mistaken for photos). Pre-20th century stuff tends not to crop aggressively (you don't see many full-frame face portraits, much less with 1/3 or more of the face actually outside the frame), and strongly favors a window/proscenium-style use of perspective. A big part of the "movie poster" effect in the photos used is the modern style perspective. Even if you backed up the cropping to a 3/4 portrait, it would still look anachronistic due to the focal length and angling in the pics.