Zandina's House - The Windows Are In.

I promised to post this week about the windows on Zandina's House, as I have a better way to create the leading effect after last year's attempt with fruit bag netting. This looked ok but because of the stretchy nature of the material, keeping the same shape and consistency of size of the gaps was tricky.

Whilst wandering around one of those pound stores (other low price denomination shops are also available) that proliferate around Romford, I found something that caught my eye. 

It wasn't in the toy section, stationary or even DIY. I found this in the baking department; it's a non-stick, cake cooling tray. 

Up close and personal it looks like weaved squares. I bought one, took it home, didn't do any baking with it, instead I cut it into small squares and painted it black. Despite being non-stick the black acrylic paint took quite well.

So these small squares cut to size will be the leading. I then took the plastic box I used last time from the underwear packaging and cut that into small squares to fit inside the windows. 

This is very rigid plastic and just slightly opaque so it gives the dull window effect rather than being too see through to the painted card underneath.

Some of the windows I wanted to have a 'lit' feel, but not with actual lighting. I tried a couple of colours for these windows first, eventually going with a ‘butter cream’ and ‘yellow’ mix, which I think gives a warm glow through the plastic windows.

With the windows painted either yellow/cream or black, I placed on the plastic then the painted tray cut pieces and finally held the lot in place by inserting a very slim frame cut from  the coffee sticks, about a third width, and stuck in. 

This gives an inner window frame as well as the main frame work. Then the additional frame was painted black and a few touch ups made to the leading. I’ve got some finishing off work to do but at last I feel that I am making progress with this model.

                     

Oh yes, this posting's short teaser from Karl's story...

Instinctively Hermer obeyed, trembling he extended his right hand, palm upwards before the templars. Their leader dropped what appeared to be a coin into Hermer’s hand; but it was not a coin that was acceptable currency.

      Hermer screamed as the coin burnt into his hand, he tried to drop it but it had adhered to his flesh. Wisps of red smoke trailed out as the coin burnt him. Lugger made a grab for the coin, but a swift blow from one of the morning stars held by another of the templars sent him sprawling backwards.

Been a bit distracted.

Sorry I've been a bit quiet these last few weeks, been a bit busy and not with model work, and I didn't want to deliver too many off topic postings, so I thought I'd do one quick round up now and promise that the next posting will be a model work one and quite soon.

As I said not much model work, only some of the painting on Zandina's town house which features in the Karl story. Although today I did get started on the finishing work on the windows, and it will be this work I'll be blogging about quite soon. Some of my time has been taken up with the book, and the sequel. My main aim at the moment is to get the full draft copy of the second together by the end of June. I also have quite a bit of spring cleaning to get done as well.

Most of last week was spent posting teasers from the original on Facebook; I thought that I had hassled you guys about the book enough for a while. But I did get an odd comment the other day, “I really liked how you made me wonder what the mystery behind this character is. You should have given us a little bit more insights though.” I would have hoped that if you were that interested you’d order a copy otherwise if I posted the whole story here there wouldn’t be any point in the book. 

I will reproduce some of the teasers here.

A couple of weekends ago I was in Peterbourgh for the 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy', a collection of Doctor Who stars past and present, Torchwood, Star Trek DS9, and Spooks to name but a few. I was there as part of the crew rather than an attendee. The Saturday was more of an odd job day for me, but Sunday I had the delightful pleasure of assisting Deborah Watling (Victoria from the 1967 to 1968 series with Patrick Troughton's Doctor). The irony is that I reviewed Deborah's autobiography on here in February. I remember giving it a very positive review.

 http://www.djksfantasyworld.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/book-review-january-february.html

A couple of nights ago I also took a tour of the print site where the FT is printed. That was a fascinating experience, watching the printing plates emerging from the laser etcher and then watching the pages come through, and the work to balance the colour and alignment can only be described as an art form in itself.

There have also been a few other theatre trips as well taking up my time, again I did not want to turn this whole blog into a review blog so I didn’t post every one. Hopefully with the weather improving I’ll get some time to use the table in the garden and get some model work done soon.

This was last Monday’s teaser, I will include another with the next posting.

She was dead.

No, you cannot see your own grave. But it was true; both names belonged to her. Had belonged to her. It had to be true. And was that Karl again? Who were the others - Thomas, Hanna and Katarina? ...

http://www.hundredpublishing.com/derek.html

Zandina's House and a List of Lists

The other day my old mate over at BigLee’s Miniature Adventures  wrote a list of all his model work that he had to do, for a moment I contemplated that, but I think I would have to put together many lists and then generate a list of lists, what with the many projects I have on the go. Instead of spending time writing all these lists I should just try and finish one thing at a time. The high level lists would be something like this:-

Finish Karl – The Lost Adventurer (Book  2 of the Karl trilogy, actually nearly finished)

Karl – The Conclusion (Title under wraps for the moment, plotted out)

Models based on Karl’s story.

Paint figures for Karl’s story.

Models for the Supernatural game

Paint figures for Supernatural game.

Learn the rules for Supernatural game.

Finish the special project for our D&D ‘Evil GM’s campaign’

The Doctor Who tapestry

The New Who tapestry (Not even going to start this before the other is finished)

And so on and so on, and under each would be a whole list of models, figures and related tasks that would test the scroll bar limits of any web browser.

Top of the list would have to be some house related jobs as well, the garden being one of them. But the grass grows rampant as the rain continues to fall in the wettest drought we have ever known. From the moment The Powers That Be announced a drought and a hose pipe ban it has NOT stopped raining, to finally ending up with the wettest April since the last wettest April we have had since somebody decided it had been a wetter April than the one before. Get it? Good, I don’t need to go on then.  Here was the local weather forecast from today and tomorrow, the wet part kept drifting down time bands all day.

The one thing I did manage to do was most of the black work on the wooden frame for Zandina’s house, all I need to do now to finish this is:-

The white dry brushing on the roof.

The shading on the side wooden panels.

Pick out some brick work.

The windows.

Grey mottle the chimneys

Shade paint the doors,

and finally the leading on the windows which I have a new idea for which I’ve been experimenting with and can’t wait to add as the final touch to this building.

Oh look another list.

HELP !!!!

Zandina’s House Painting Continued

Not a lot of work completed on the models this week, just some paint work on Zandina’s town house which features in Karl’s story. Thought I would share some more ‘in progress’ photos.

First thing I did was to mix the black paint with water to wash over the brick work around the lower front part of the building. This gives the brick work a deeper, more solid appearance. Once this was dry, I dry brushed with the basic orange.

For the roof which had already been painted with a mix of burnt umber and black I also dry brushed/smeared with the orange.

I know BigLee talks about quality of paint brushes, for this work when painting on wood, wall filler and cardboard I tend not to pay out for brushes which get wrecked very quickly. I’ll save the good brushes for when I get back to the figures. These brushes are larger sized and really have seen better days but for smearing, dry brushing large areas and stippling they really need to be hard wearing rather than quality tipped. 

Zandina's House First Painting

The blog has been a bit quiet mainly because I wanted the posting to be about model work, and not much model work has been achieved recently. I will soon be adding another book review and a piece about my love / hate relationship with the iphone – the device I’ve used to take these photos today.

The one thing that has progressed is Zandina’s house. I managed to finish the roof and sanded down the sides to get any excess wall filler off the wood work, and cleaned up the wood work filling in any gaps. Next step was the black under coat. I used a basic black acrylic paint worked into the nooks and crannies using an old paint brush. This had to be repeated a second time as once dried, the paint left small white speckled patches. Again a slightly more watered down black paint was worked into the gaps to give a good consistent undercoat.

Then using just three additional basic paints I set about applying the first base coat of actual colour. These are the darker shades that will be brought up lighter with varying layers. So far I’ve used Pound stores’s Black and Orange, Wilko’s Burnt Umber, and Americana’s Butter.

The black was used as the undercoat, and then mixed with the orange for the first colour layer of the brick work; it was about 75% orange to 25% black. The roof tiles was about 50% mix of burnt umber and black, the wooden side panels was burnt umber and the plaster walls Americana’s Butter. The wooden beams will be painted over with quality black paint after once the walls are finished.

The next stages will be to add the lighter shades and weathering.

Up on the Roof

The sun is up,

The sky is blue,

The garden’s a mess,

But I’ve a back ache too.

With the weather having taken a change for spring, I really should have spent today mowing the lawn and getting the garden back into some semblance of order, but the old back is still playing up. I hope to see a physio next week to have my legs twisted and my spine pulled in such a way as only they can. I’ve had it done in the past and it really helps, so I hope that come the Easter weekend I’ll be in a better shape to get the garden challenge done. Watch this space, or twitter because I’ll probably be calling for someone to come and find me lost in the long grass.

Anyway with the sun out and not too strong, I took  the opportunity to sit in the garden with the sun warming my back (see purely medicinal you understand) I got the chimneys added to Zandina’s house using some plastic spongy packing covered in the ready mixed wall filler. I had tried to find my foam board off cuts but they’re buried somewhere at the moment – spring clean certainly needed inside as well as out at the moment – so I used this packing stuff instead, cutting two rectangular blocks which I then cut triangles out so that they fitted over the roof.  I glued them on then covered, after a while, with the ready mix filler. Once I had allowed that to go off I finished tiling with small cut squares of card to finish the roof. To cap the tiles I used thinly rolled snakes of the wall filler and pressed them down along the top edges. Once this has dried I will forge ahead with the clean up before under coating the whole model.

 

Just a quick note as well this week to other Doctor Who fans, this week’s issue of Doctor Who Adventures comes with an assortment of monster figures, some not having been released before. This looks like a mini selection box, and I’m sure from their rubbery texture they all have soft centres.

You’ve got the 5 coloured Daleks

Judoon, Ood, Silurian, Cyberman & Sontaran

2x Weaping Angels, Med Bot, Silent and Minotaur.

Raising the Roof

So that New Year’s resolution goes out of the window, well, sort of, the one where I was determined to post more updates this year. There again, there has not been much progress in the last few weeks to speak of.  A busy couple of weekends left me with little time, and this week I managed to either trap a nerve or pull a muscle in my back which has left me pretty unable to do much. Before anyone asks, no I was not building a full sized house, swinging from the light fittings or anything else adventurous or suspect – I simply turned to speak to someone whist seated. So there you go. Anyway let’s get this actual post done before the pain killer wear off.

What I was going to talk about last week was Zandina’s house. I had decided to get some tiling done on the roof, when I unboxed the model and realised just how unhappy I was with the roof in general. There was a gaping hole along the edges, the roof itself was too much sunk in, so before tiling could begin some redial work had to take place.

I glued some more card inside the roof cavity to bolster up, and hold down the flapping roof edges, and added additional layers of card over the top of the existing roof to raise the level nearer to the side beams. 

I even had to raise part of the side of the porch tower roof and add a missing beam in. Oh the delights of rushing. Anyway, with all that left to dry the tiling could not start for another few days.

Now the tiling has begun and would you believe it, all the tiles I had previously cut have gone missing, I think they’re boxed up somewhere but I’ve had to cut extra.

Once I’ve added the chimney (whoops nearly forgot that too) and completed the tile coverage I think I’ll get away with it. The chimney will be added on as a couple of pieces of foam board over the roof top. What you might not be able to see on the photo is the text on the added pieces of card taken from an Amazon delivery. It states how to responsibly dispose of the cardboard packaging, I’m not sure this was their original idea.

Model Work in October Sunshine

We’ve had some very unseasonal weather in London and the South of England this week, which meant that at the start of October I’m working outside with sun block on, and the shade up building models. It’s was reported that yesterday was the hottest October day on record. I managed to get some model work done today. Here’s a quick update, it’s good to be back on the model work.

The coffee stick house built from the recycled boxes is now fully covered in sticks, and has been given a black undercoat.

Zandina’s house, which can be used as a mansion or manor house has been quite well built up today. The last of the wood work has been added, and the base and front towers have been built using the DAS putty to form stone based front, the rest of the panels were again built with wall filler

I also managed to get some decoration on one of the graveyard panels.