Questions questions! Let me see if I can answer them.
The sawmill did not win the competition, though it was enough for a good second place. Very stiff competition I must say and the winner was VERY well-deserved. I was terribly flattered to even place that high.
Some of my general techniques:
- These are actual game pieces. They will bear handling, though I doubt they'd survive a store environment or a horde of kids snotlings.
- I always stain wood with cheap craft acrylics and water rather than painting it. I usually use some mix of cerulean blue (the "warm" primary blue, rather than the "cool" primary blue), raw sienna (yellowy-brown), burnt sienna (reddish-brown) and black. The blue is mostly used in very small quantities to deaden the brown. By using these colours and varying the amount of water in the wash, I can get anything from a nice warm silver-grey (for older wooden buildings), to a rich (but not artificial) brown for newer buildings or even the yellow-brown of fresh lumber.
The only drawback to staining is that you must stain all wood before gluing it in place, otherwise the glue acts as a barrier to the wash and you get unsightly holes of unpainted wood. For areas that you only see one side of (like the walls), I can glue the wood on first and then wash the building all in one go. But for places where you see all side of the wood (like the open roof-truss area in the sawmill), I have to apply washes to each piece before gluing.
- The roof of the first house is done by hand. I get thin strips of basswood (1/32nd of an inch thick), in 1/4 and 3/16ths widths. I then cut lengths freely with scissors and carefully glue them on in rows from bottom to top. After the roof is dry, I apply a wash to the whole roof (I used to have a lot of bare spots, but I've gotten much better at not letting glue on the surface of the shingles). The little strips on the peaks were washed and added separately, since there was no way to prevent that glue from getting on the tops of the shingles.
- The hinges and handles are made from cardboard and wire. I glue on the cardboard and then drill holes for wire handles (for the hinges, I just glued a bit of wire in place). They're painted mostly black, with just a light touch of boltgun metal mixed in. I then do a very faint edge highlight with more boltgun metal. If I need rust, I add some burnt sienna.
Some answers to questions that weren't asked:
- For tool heads, I baked a little block of FIMO-alike and then carved axe-heads etc. out of it. It's flexible and smooth enough to make carving a snap, firm enough to retain its shape, and takes paint decently well.
- Ground is plaster wall compound, slightly diluted with water to improve flow. A brown wash is applied in two stages, light and then a thinner darker to deaden the colour and increase height variation.
- I cheated to make the saw blades! I had a real coping saw, with some spare blades. The saw was almost useless to me, so I just snapped off segments of blade to get what I wanted. It translated very well to this scale!
- The sawdust is real sawdust. I just ran a bit of basswood over a piece of sandpaper until I had a pile big enough to use for flocking.
Anything else you need to know, I'll be happy to share!
10 October 2015, 04:47:47 PM