Old West Sheriff Office

I started the floor by making a frame for the main part of the building & a beam for the wood slats of the porch to attach to.

Then cut loads & loads of tongue depressor sticks to be the floor boards.

To make them look a little more authentic, I chipped away some of the ends & made little nails holes with the tip of a hobby knife. (Before: on left, After: on right)

While I was test fitting the boards I realized that A.) I did not have enough support beams on my frame & B.) craft sticks are not all square nor straight. So I added a piece of black paper to the top of the frame & then glued my boards onto that. 

 

Here's how it looks all together

The walls were cut out of foamcore sheets

For the wood siding, I took some thin sheets of balsa & cut them into random length strips

I drew on lines on my foam wall so I could glue my siding on straight & have them all overlap the same amount.

Using some round & rectangular Styrene rod I got from a local hobby store, made the jail cell & some bars on the windows

Here's the window first because that one is easy

The jail cells on the other hand took some doing. I took the rectangle rod and cut 4 pieces the length of the building. Then using a pin vice, I drilled holes in them to fit the round rod.

It took a lot of fiddley work, but the finished piece looked great

I also used bits of this styrene on my stove. There's chunks of the rectangle one as feet, the band around the middle of the stove is the round one. The rest of this is made from a small pill bottle, a penny, some thin card, bits from an oil tank & drinking straw.

Back to the building itself. I made a mix of brown washes & used it to stain the floor boards

And added trim around the outside of the building

It's hard to see, but I smooth a layer of spackle on the inside of the walls before putting it together & then add trim inside.

After that, I fianlly attached all 4 walls together, spackled the corner joints, & then painted.

To furnish the inside, I gather a lot of scraps I had laying around. Like a couple posts from the hinges of a makeup container, plus some Sculpey clay makes a decent set of double barrel shot guns

A tongue depressor & some fine chain make a good cot

Wood scraps for a table, gun rack & book shelf

Little pieces of craft sticks & foam core with paper wrapped around them were added for books

I grabbed a little stick from outside to cut up for a pile of fire wood.

I printed off some wanted posters off a laser printer and then soaked them in a sepia wash to make the paper look weathered. (Do not do this from an inkjet printer. That is a water based ink & will bleed once you get it wet.)

I did this for the newspaper on the desk as well; it was a lot easier to fold that small while it was wet.

For the sheriff's bulletin board of case notes, etc. I put the scraps of paper into the sepia wash first, waited for them to dry & then painted on things like a map, or portrait.

Here's what they look like placed

You'll notice I put some window shades up as well. This is the same principle as the wanted posters. I got the paper wet in a colored wash, then wrapped around a wire while it was still wet. A small bead & some thread make up the pull handle.

Now, for the outside of the building. I went & painted the whole thing in acrylic paint

Then went over the whole thing with a rough sandpaper to weather it, then went over the now raw wood with a Tamiya Smoke wash

To build the roof, I cut out a base of thin card to fit with some over hang, and placed row after row of balsa chunks to act like shingles.

After they were all placed, I went through & roughed up the ends so it didn't look so "new"

Then went over the whole thing with varying brown washes & heavy spots of diluted black acrylic paint. Doing the black while the washes were still wet did all the blending for me

Let's go back inside & make some more details. Can't have a desk without a chair, so I built one out of clay. Same with a piss pot for the jail cell & coffee pot. The can of beans & booze bottle were made from beads

I sculpted a set of cow horns from clay

A coat rack from bamboo skewers & hat from clay

And a few oil lamps from beads to finish it off

Wizard's Towers

My main goal for this one was to make it look surreal/whimsical/almost cartoonish. So, I decided to make the towers twist.  The quickest/simplest way to make the shape I was going for was just to stack, twist & cut insulation foam.

Repeated the process with larger blocks & I've got my 2 towers. The large one is about 12" tall & the little about 9".
I added some rock formations to the bottom & other details for doors, etc.

And then let the fiddley games begin! To add to the hap-hazardous look of the tower, I placed all the stone work instead of drawing it into the foam. I was a little wary at first, but the more I put on the better it looks. I started with framing the door & window openings and then filled in the rest of the walls.

  I do know that the towers are built well enough to survive fuzzy dragon attacks. ;-)

And the wizards what lives here is powerful enough to enchant said dragon into being his new guard. :-)

So I painted it all black, got the open areas of the bricks a medium gray & then sponged on some white. I was originally thinking I might need, mortar, but after seeing this realized it was unnecessary.
(Disregard the color of the base rock. I know it's terrible & I fixed it later on.)

Then, I got an excellent suggestion from a Canadian to use iridescent paint. Basically, I had a pearl medium that I mixed into some wash colors - this made it almost too shiny and pastel. As if there was barely any color/texture to the bricks at all. What I ultimately did was take that mix of medium & wash on a large brush & randomly/quickly dry brushed this on, then put another wash over it of just the pure color - no pearl. Some areas are purple, some blue... I think it turned out well --

This is hard to photograph. So I also grabbed a video so you can kinda of see how the shine & color interact. You can see it here

Here is a shot of the repainted rock faces - less poop, more fantastical rock.

Of course such a unique shaped building can't have a normal roof. The only way I could think to make the roof the odd shape I was looking for was with Sculpey clay. So I made a basic shape out of card & covered it in aluminum foil.

I did my clay shape on top of that - then I gently removed the clay & foil to put it in the oven. And taadaa! One goofy roof:

Plus some wonky shingles:

The first roof attempt was actually conical; it looked odd & not in a good way. I'm much happier with the flat sides. 

 

  Here is the work done on the floating bits. The entry steps started with a strip of plastic forming an angle from the side & base of the tower

I then made stone steps with angle brackets glued to the bottom to give it a surface to attach to the plastic

Taadaa! We have some floaty steps with enough strength to easily hold a metal model.
 

That middle step does cause the plastic sheet to bend a little under the weight, but it's nothing major.


For the bridge, I took a hobby knife & cut a slots into either side of the bridge platforms to hold my weaker craft magnets
 

Then I took a sheet of plastic & added random floaty stones, plus 2 rare earth magnets to connect the bridge to the towers.

Here's the bridge attached. I mixed the 2 types of magnets because rare earth on rare earth was too strong of a hold, trying to disconnect the brdge would cause damage to one end or the other. Alternatively, craft magnet on craft magnet was too weak. Mixing the 2 was a happy medium.

The roofs painted:

Doors detailed with bits from an old bracelet

 

This was my first snow attempt & I've learned a few very important things. 1.) The ratio of baking soda to glue is very important 2.) pure baking soda tastes bad & 3.) baking soda is not a good thing to get into your eye.

On the roofs, I had my mixture too dry...

And on the base/bricks I had it too wet.

I some how need to find a good balance between the two.

For the icicles I took the hot glue gun & made some squiggles on a tin container I had handy.

Then glued them to the edges. At first attachment, some ended up sideways. So, I went it with the hot tip of the gun & gently melted them so they hung straight down. (the best I could, at least)

Ooo, ominous shadows:

Plus it looks right at home in the snowy out-of-doors.