Esoteric spring cleaning

I keep painting elements of the diorama, but at the same time I was hit by drop of motivation, mostly caused by lack of idea what to actually put inside. Also, the rollers cause some problems, some details are much less pronounced then others and I have major problems distinguishing their shapes and painting them properly.

As side note, I’m not sure of that emerald green I’ve introduced in one of the scenes. Any ideas what to use instead?

Not much was done this week. With kids off school (even the home-borne one) I did only some painting. I also printed decorations after I found appropriate figures over on Internet.

I  took some pictures showing why I had all those different holes around my frame. Descriptions bellow.

Title has it all.

To boost my morale after seeing some other projects I dry-fitted parts created earlier.

Painting itself was quite an easy task. The process is described in steps under each photo.

I had a busy weekend.

Bellow you see photos illustrating my process of creating textures. First I did the floor. I wanted it to have rather battered, worn look, so I avoided using any rollers or other “machine” manufacture. Instated I went for some child-play heat hardening clay and hand sculpted a pattern of stones which in reality would be carved out by stone masons on site to fit any gap the artisans had to fill. That way it became very irregular in all three dimensions. But before that:

For the walls, the clue of this part of spring cleaning all the irrational ideas out of my mind , I used the GSW rolling pin. But to clean even more, I didn’t use my usual mixture of miliput and plasticine but used a sample of super sculpy, which I got from GSW as a bonus in my first order from them 6 or 7 years back. I have to admit I worked beautifully and can easily replace my normal mixture. It is less sticky (to the point where actually mixing two pieces of it together requires quite a lot of work), and transfers details equally well. On top of that , backing if much faster than waiting for miliput to cure. I have 1kg of that material stored somewhere…

Since I already have my first frame I can start creating my 3d cartoon.

As stated in project description I want to employ as many tools and technics I never used as possible. Until now I had no occasion to use my Egyptian rolling pin, nor have I ever ventured into territories of that aesthetics. To change that, I’ll build a quasi-Egyptian tomb chamber with appropriately decorated walls and obligatory mummy. Something like that:

Yeah it takes a while to print, but after it prints it looks really good.

Just couple of words of explanation on why the shape is so weird. And why does it use all those holes. The main thing is to print it with no supports with front frame touching print bed. Second, and that is why I used OpernLock system is ease of modification and stacking capability (in different planes and sizes). The holes visible all around the shape allow to connect more modules.

To explore my ideas I designed a frame/box for small dioramas scenes. The idea is that it os stackable and scalable. As I write it the first prototype is printing.