Merry Mayhem

Alright, folks this is going to be a long one because I'm going to cram a whole table's worth of terrain in one post. I was commissioned to make 8 pieces for a Warhammer Fantasy tournament. It's a Christmas themed tournament so the client wanted a North Pole-ish table. Other than that, I was pretty much free to do as I pleased. Here's the results: a reindeer barn, Santa's workshop, post office, Xmas tree, ice skating pond, sinister snowman, ruined ice wall, and candy cane forest.

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Let's start with the forest. One thing I like this piece is that it in no way needs to look real. So to start- I salvaged a bunch of electrical wire from a machine we were getting rid of at my work and used it to twist together the frame work of a tree. Then, I rolled 6-8 pieces of Sculpey oven bake clay and wrapped them around the trunk, taking one of the strips and ending it on a lower branches as I went. Surprisingly, the plastic wire casing had no problems being in the oven for the designated Sculpey time.

Then I painted them in proper candy cane fashion & gave them a semi-gloss varnish. For the foliage I took some clear plastic, attached it to the branches & smothered them with PVA (top & bottom) to hold some large flake glitter I had.

Do this a few more times & it's starting to look like a forest.

Now, for the basing I mixed baking soda & PVA until it was much like a wet Play-Doh consistency and then sculpted it around the base of the trees.

 I did this across the whole forest floor as well, leaving it higher & lower in spots to keep it looking natural. When it was dry, I brushed the ground with straight PVA & dumped on Woodland Scenics snow.

After that it was just a matter of adding random bits inbetween the large trees, such as: dried flowers, styrene rod I melted & painted to look like traditional candy canes, straight pins, a sprig of branches with 'ice chunks' that like to fall off from Hobby Lobby's Xmas section & white cord from a dog toy that is a lot like plastic sisal rope.

And while I was taking the final photos of the piece, I realized there's no good angle to shoot this at, so here's a bunch of crappy ones. Hopefully you can get the jist.

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Next, I wanted to do a ginormous Xmas tree for the "town square" type of idea. I was debating the easiest way to make the skeleton of an evergreen that size & settled on buying a toilet brush & trimming it to shape. That is, until a visit to my lovely local World Market and found this stylish tree. I usually despise stores that start selling Christmas decor in October, but it came in handy this year.

I did my best to rub off most of the glitter, then spray painted it random patches of brown & black. (Cruddy photo, I know. I'm sorry)

Then I used a spray adhesive to coat all the branches & then sprinkled on random colors of static grass. I had to repeat a few layers of the spray glue & grass to get it looking full but it in the end it turned out quite nicely. Which of course, means I didn't take a picture. Razz But no worries, I have some close ups of the final piece that show this well.

So, what's a Xmas tree with out lights? Lame, that's what. What fun are lights, if you can see the batteries? No fun, that's the kind of fun. So, I ended up making a pretty big stone pedestal for the tree out of foamcore. (We'll call it a fountain in the off-season. Does the North Pole have an off season?) To make a cavity for the battery boxes, I started cutting out the foam with an X-acto blade. Then took my wood burner & unscrewed the tip and used the neck of it to clean up the edges.

Tip: A wood burner gets a lot hotter than it needs to be for foam. If you try this at home, practice on scrap foam first to get a feel for hot quickly it will melt.

Then I melted some holes through the top of the pedestal for the light strings to come through & textured the surface with a pencil eraser.

Then I drew in cracks with a pen & painted.


To act as a cover for the battery compartment, I took a piece of a plastic tube, melted & flattened one end, then drilled a hole into a CD to fit the tube.

I poked the unflattened end of the tube into the bottom of the base with some hot glue. Now the CD can swing open & close to access the light switches.

 

 I attached the tree to it's base, & started decorating. I used a shiny pipe cleaner for tinsel, then a lot of beads & wire for ornaments & that's about it.

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Next up: the buildings.
I started by saving some fallen sticks from the lawnmower man at our local park. Stripped the bark off & hot glued 2 of them together in shape of the perimeter of each building. Then cut & attached the upper half of the walls out of foam core. Like this:

And this:

What you're looking at is a reindeer barn on the top, Santa's workshop on the right & the post office on the bottom left.

I covered the sides of the walls in spackle, then dabbed it with a wet paper towel to smooth out the tell-tale goobers. And cut the base of my roofs from cereal card.

I printed out a bunch of window panes from my computer, glued them behind pieces of plastic & stuck them to the sides of the buildings.

Then stained a bunch of skinny craft sticks and attached them in a tudor-style framing.

I put some chimneys together but cutting individual bricks from foamcore & gluing them down. Then, I bought a 3/4" hole punch from the scrapbooky section and used it to make some cutesy shingles.

As far as most shingling I've done, this was actually pretty quick & painless. Pretty soon I had this:

I couldn't tell you why, but I have a thing for awnings. So, I took this opportunity to make some for the post office. I just printed out stripes on paper, then cut it out in a shape that'll fold easily & have flaps to glue onto the side of the building

I had a couple more sets of LED string lights, so I put them on the barn & post office. Both have working hinged doors to access the battery packs. I obviously already cut the windows for the reindeer out of the barn, so to keep the batteries hidden I added a piece of black cardboard to the inside of each wall about an inch away from the windows. So you can still see in, but not through and the battery has a nice little area to hangout in, instead of sliding around the whole inside of the building.

Time for more snow. Like the forest, I used PVA & baking soda mixed to a paste to press on to the roofs & bases for the bulk of the snow. Then I brushed with PVA & dusted with snow flocking.

To make Santa's Workshop actually look like a workshop, I made a conveyer out the back to drop toys into the Santa sack. This was made from cutting a shape from cereal card & attaching chunks of bamboo skewers, then glueing strips of more cereal card to the edges.

And I made gifts, a teddy bear & the sack out of Sculpey

And that's about it for these. Here's some pictures of them completed.

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Not too much to say or show about this piece. It's just clear resin cast in a hirst arts mold. The directions on your resin box and the resin tutorial at the Hirst Arts site will explan what you have to do a lot better than I ever could. I didn't have a whole lot of time to cast lots of blocks, so I did what I could: ruins. Every Warhammer table needs ruins, right? :-P

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For the ice skating pond, I bought a round mirror on clearance at the craft store & lightly sprayed the edges with white primer.

Then I cut out a shape using a CD jewel case to be the ice

I used a course sandpaper on it to scratch in trails from ice skates

Then painted the under side (non-scratched side) with a stippling of white, light blue mixed with a pearlecent, and mythril silver. Using the same PVA & glue snow, I put a couple wads under the edges of the ice layer to keep it away from the mirror a little bit, then formed a slope of snow from the edge of the ice to the edge of the mirror base.

Some more random wintery foliage & a park bench and we're done.

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Lastly but definitely not leastly, we have a sinister snowman.

He's 99% sculpted out of clay with arms scratched with a point metal tool, then brushed PVA on him & sprinkled him with Woodland Scenics snow.

And he wouldn't be sinister without something afraid of him, so I made some quick snow victims as well.

 Also, I don't know if any of you are familiar with Jhonen Vasquez, but in his comics & later his cartoon Invader Zim, he drew most anything that was spooky with meniacal swirls of doom.

 While, I know I didn't do Jhonen justice with this, that was what I was going for by adding shoots of fiber fill around his feet. I patted on a little PVA to help them keep their shape.

 Here's the final results

 And that is it, blogger land. Hope you enjoyed this - comments & questions are surely welcomed. So long from the North Pole :P