Goblin Halloween Diorama - Part 8- Field Project

Stained craft sticks for clapboards.

I have had a fair amount of time to work on the diorama this week.  Although it does not look it, that pile of sticks in the first photo represents several hours worth of work.  I started cutting the rounded tips off the craft sticks last week and sanding them.  I developed quite the blister on my little finger from the scissors during that process.  I also sanded the sticks with a sixty grit sand paper because they were too smooth.  I wanted the wood to look worn and rough.  The sanding also removed some of the clear polyurethane from the sticks.

Scored to look like wood grain.

As I had mentioned in one of the very early posts on this diorama, I had read an article on how to make buildings look aged in a model railroad magazine.  I'm not trying to follow the instructions exactly, but work with the general gist of the idea.  In the article, the writer said that he had scored his planks with some sort of toothed tool.  I don't remember the name of it six months down the road, but I don't have one.  But I thought that he was on to something with scoring the planks, so I scored the planks I made with a sharp stylus.  I tried to score four lines into each plank on both sides of the planks.  I used enough pressure to scratch in a line, but held the stylus loose enough that the stylus could follow the contours of the wood grain.  This took a while since I was scoring them one line at a time.

Old barn used for color inspiration.

Field 7-20-2014

Once all the planks had been sanded and scored (I sanded first because I did not want to sand out my score lines.) I stained them with thinned black paint.  I remembered that the magazine article had said he used 1 part paint to 10 parts water.  I tried that, but only it looked dark.  Usually acrylic paint dries darker than it appears when it is wet.  In this case the paint dried lighter, and it looked too light so I changed it to a 1 part paint to 12 parts water and gave the sticks two coats.  The effect I was trying to get was the color of wood in old abandoned buildings.  I am not totally satisfied with the color, but it is close.  The old building in the third picture is more or  less the color I was shooting for.  The stain soaked into the grooves I had scratched into the sticks, and they really do look like old wood.  I'm putting up a close up of a stick so you can see the grain, but I am not sure how the resolution will look online.

Morning Glory bloom.

Other than that, I cut out the windows in the building.  The building is painted black inside as well.  I did not cut out the door because the door will be pasted to the front.  I am not planning on having the door open and close.  That is about as much work as I could get done this week.  This week I will be working on building the door and windows.  After that the clapboards go on. 

Today's field project picture looks much the same as last week.  I don't see anything coming up in the furrows that have been plowed in the field.  I think some of the vegetation coming up in the foreground might be mustard greens.  Most of it is just grass and weeds.  Even though the field has been plowed and mowed, the native vegetation is still hanging on.  I saw the first blooms of morning glory flowers this morning.