Goblin Halloween Diorama- Part 11

I have been working on the door of the diorama for the last few days.  My vision for my door was inspired by doors on abandoned buildings.  When buildings are abandoned, they eventually become grimy and develop mold.  Water gets into cracks and seeps into the wood.  Mold develops if the wood stay wet.  This is what I am trying to portray on the house in this piece. 

The door is only two and a half inches high.  Working that small presents some challenges.  It can be difficult to hold on to tiny pieces.  Sometimes I use tweezers.  The door is not intended to open, it will be glued to the wall.  The action in the diorama will be outside of the abandoned home.  Gluing it to the wall solves a few problems.  I won't have to create working hinges or use materials that will allow the door to swing. 

The door is constructed from poster board.  I cut three rectangles from the poster board and glued them together.  It looked a little plain.  I originally put some raised strips around the perimeter, but they were too large.  The scale looked off.  I removed those strips and replaced them with one-eighth inch strips of poster board glued vertically.  That worked, but it was still a little plain for a front door.  I added strips around the perimeter again, but they were smaller this time.  That worked. 

Before painting the door, I gave it a coat of glue to help waterproof it.  After the glue was dry, the door was painted with a diluted black paint: 1:12 dilution.  The paint allowed to run into the cracks, then lifted off with a paper towel.  I kept applying paint and lifting off until I had the door looking as I wanted it to look.  There was one moment when I hit the oops too much.  I scrubbed to lift off, and a portion of the strip peeled off.  I had to repaint that area.  Fortunately, it did not ruin the door. 

The door knob is a lesson in why I never want to throw anything out.  Regular readers know that I did a major purge of my junk stash recently when cleaning up after making home repairs.  My studio was so full of little bits of this and that, I was finding it hard to move around.  Something had to go.  Anyway, the door needed a door knob.  A seed bead was just the right size.  Unfortunately, the box of miscellaneous bead bits were one of the things that were donated to an art group.   The door knob was all that was needed to complete the door.  I ended up cutting up a shell and bead necklace to get the one seed bead I needed.  The bead was glued on and painted with a mixture of antique bronze and metallic espresso paint.  When everything was dry, I gave the door a coat of varnish.  After the varnish dried, I glued the door to the building.  

Up until now, the blog has mostly been about the construction of the house.  The building is just the first part of the diorama.  The diorama has a story to tell that goes beyond the construction of its individual parts.  Once the house is complete, the story will start to develop as I add in the other items of the diorama.  There is much more to come.  I think the diorama will turn out to be an interesting piece.  More on the story in future blog posts.

The next step will be to put the clapboards on the house.  I should have more on that in the next blog post.