Shoe's 30 for 30, day 31: retro

Anyone who's been following for the last 30 days know that this month I've built or painted and sometimes wrote a pile of stuff.  I figured I'd take a post to go over the highs, lows, and learnings in the hopes that it might help someone else going on a similar journey, however short or long.  Also, it makes the 20 posts in the last four years seem extra anemic compared to 31 in one month.  March is greedy having 31 days.

The bill of goods, if anyone cares, looks like this:

• 15x scatter terrain (treasure chest, 4x scatter walls, 6x crates, 4x shacks)
• 26x minis painted
• 14x buildings (merchant's house, tavern, village hall, guard tower, modular house, house with modular roof, thatched roof cottage, second floor modular, merchant's shop, tavern #2, windmill, 2x farmhouses, Bugman's Brewery)
• 1x article

Thanks for being sunny today, weather!

I think the biggest improvements are around the techniques, materials and tools in the hobby.  I already had a pretty good handle on mini paints but craft paints are IMO a lot harder to use.  I said way back on day 2 that XPS is a pretty forgiving medium and I still believe that.  The limits of the materials and tools are a lot clearer now.  I can draw very good parallels between learning how to work with large Lego structures and this process.

One of the bigger learnings was how to plan a building project, even a small one, and what things make it easier, harder, more detailed, less accurate, etc.  I've infamously said that engineering is an exercise of tradeoffs and I hope that some of my rantings in the last 30 days show the process I went through and why I landed on the things I did.  Throughout the challenge up until Bugman's, I was pretty sure I would be building another structure.   It might seem lame but knowing this gave me an excuse to try something new and I experimented quite a lot. 

I also feel I've improved my painting quite a lot.  Part of that was making build concessions which meant that I was less likely to get bored/fatigued/interrupted.  That results in fewer mistakes.  A real big chunk of the improvement is due to finally making a proper wash.  It also took me a while to dial in how to properly drybrush with craft paints but I think I'm getting it now.  I'm still not a good painter and I might not ever be, but I don't feel like I'm going to mess a thing up anymore.  Vince gives the advice to paint bravely and I freely admit that I struggle with this one.

I only wrote one article though I have many (many) in the works that I got significant effort into.  I thought I'd need these more than I did which just means I get to pump up my post count for the rest of the year.  Bonus!  I also didn't do any illustrations which, well, is a little disappointing.  Soon, hopefully.

I learned a ton about architecture and the European middle ages, too.  I've typed it before but I'll type it again:  verisimilitude is important to me, and I expend considerable effort trying to get the details right.  My "research" leads me down rabbit holes pretty often and this one was no exception.  New words in my vocabulary that I picked up during this challenge:  dormer, hipped roofing, thatching, half-timbered, field stone, and probably a handful of others I've forgotten.

As an interesting anecdote, I started listening to RollPlay Swan Song a little before starting this challenge.  It was, more than most things, a near-constant companion during this effort.  The last bits of the last episode played as I set up this shot which is somehow fitting.  I've always found it interesting how disparate things can become closely associated.  I think I will associate this month with that show and how crazy, thought-provoking, and entertaining it is.  It's worth a watch if you have the time. 

It's been a heck of a month and at the end of my 30 day sojourn I feel a lot more confident in the field of table top crafting.  I didn't go into this thing with any particular expectations other than working on it, but I feel like I got more out of it than I put in.  Despite the time commitment, I think I'd do it again if I had the opportunity.  Then again, I do still have 71 minis to paint this year!

Also, shingles are still bullshit.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 30: Bugman's Brewery

And on the last day we have something extra fun.  When I started building stuff, I asked the eponymous Shoe what I could build for him.  He gave me a grainy photo of a wargaming table with a big building in the middle.  Apparently Bugman's Brewery is a fun piece of Warhammer lore but since I don't play that game I don't really have the details.  An intertoobs search got me this stuff.  Using the photographic evidence I've found online as a starting point, here's my take on this particular piece of lore.

The first and most difficult thing is its size.  It's the biggest structure I've built and defied easy handling in a bunch of ways.  Three things made this easier.  First, Shoe's going to handle the painting which is just as well because he's a much better painter.  Second, it doesn't need an interior playable space so I guess that's also a first for one of my buildings.  Third, I don't need to base it--it's just the building.  I'm sure Shoe will base it which again is just as well because he's going to do a much better job than I will.

As this is the last day of the challenge and it's a gift, I wanted to punch up the detail a bit but I had other obligations today.  I normally pop out windows out because I have this delusion that I'm going to use my cool Dollar Tree tea lights to light these guys.  In this case there's no reason to so instead of popping them out, I built some of them up. 

There are six windows on the bottom floor so I made those simple--they're shuddered.  This gave some really fun visual interest and I imagine that some of them have been replaced over time because Bugman's is a rowdy joint.  The ones upstairs I wanted to something really fun with and since there are only two of them, I pushed them out as bay windows.  I didn't glue the mesh pieces in (not shown) to aid in the painting.  Same with the door.

I'm not sure it comes out in the photos, but the building is a T-shape with a thing hanging off of one side in the back. I imagine this as a pretty normal building with a smokehouse tacked on out back.  The smokehouse is almost like my shacks from day 20 except sturdier and attached to the building. 

Since I suspect Shoe won't be around to pick this guy up any time soon, I may tinker with it more over the next couple days at a more leisurely pace.  It should be pretty cool when it's painted.  This ends Shoe's 30 for 30 challenge and I think it's gone well.  I'll do a wrap up tomorrow.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 29

They're less dark in meat space.

These aren't especially complicated but there are two of them and they're painted.  For context, we're going to get in the WaBac(TM) machine to the beginning of February.  I've been Proxxoning for like two or three weeks and I stumble across BMC's Medieval Cottage.   I built two of these, pictures lost in the mists of time.  The originals were a pain to build and more of a pain to paint.  They were buildings #2 and #3 that I'd built out of XPS as I started tenuously exploring this medium.  Today (well, yesterday) I revisited those same builds with all the stuff I learned since then.

I think I'm getting the hang of this.

The stonework was done with a pen and I glued these together with PVA to keep the seams neat.  I mostly succeeded.  Remembering all the trouble I routinely have with painting these guys and the fact that they don't often read well from the table, I made the stones extra big.  This also made them easier to draw.  If you count the chimneys and hearths texturing took about an hour per building.

The pitch on these roofs is exactly 45 degrees on purpose.  At this scale I don't have to do anything weird to get pieces of the correct size.  I made two changes in construction this time around.  First, I glued my interior braces to the roof and the pieces of roof together before gluing them to the wall.  I've been in the habit of gluing each piece to the existing walls first.  For big pieces this is really painful and I ended up with some pretty serious gaps and other faults as a result.  Second, I textured most of the shingles on the build.

Build complete!

I used to texture shingles before cutting them and stopped because it was a pain.  The static charge you get on foam shingles by running a wire brush over them for texturing is significant and they aren't very heavy.  As a result, they'll frustrate most attempts to keep them together.  I started as normal and about the third time I had them fly all over my workstation while moving my bin, I decided to texture and cut as I went.  I found my cutting was more accurate and the long strips don't generally have trouble fitting in bins.  I think this is a win and as a bonus, I think they look much better. 

So here are my two new farmhouses.  Total build and painting (not drying) time for both is right around four and a half hours. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 28

Painting today as expected but I got a head start for tomorrow's and Saturday's build.  The mill wasn't especially difficult to paint, especially since the vanes pull off (yay Lego!) but I did try to not gum up any of the working pieces.

The raw wood was only washed with my terrible brown wash and not primed.  This wash looks lousy most of the time but it does make wood look fairly weathered in one coat.  I didn't dare drybrush these despite being fully cured with wood glue.  I don't think toothpicks were really meant for that kind of abuse.

The walls and whatnot are pretty much the same grey with lighter drybrush and wash.  If it looks like the vanes don't line up properly with the door, that's a side effect of me whittling the doorway after building.  The roof washed out even though it was supposed to be dark.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 27: windmill

As I'm running out of days in this challenge I decided to do something interesting.  That was almost a mistake as it turned out.  I don't think this is my best work but I learned a ton on the way.  I had three goals:

1. make the thing stand straight
2. slightly taper the walls better than on day 12.  
3. add at least one playable floor

The vanes (?) are made of coffee stirrers and toothpicks wood glued together.  I'm not even sure why I have wood glue or when I might have bought it but I do.  Because I didn't trust my ability to build working mechanisms in foam and toothpicks I sacrificed a handful of Lego bricks on this build.  As a result, the whole thing does rotate though it isn't quite tall enough despite all my measuring.

The first goal kind of worked itself out.  There isn't any special counter weighting in the structure as the blades ended up being pretty light.  So we got that one for free.

The second goal was realized by making a guide and working mainly with PVA.  You can see my guide on the right in one of those shots, and yes, I build a lot of tools out of Lego.  I knew the height was going to be right around four inches for the walls and had a good beginning and ending width.  I didn't do math on the slope, really, I just worked with the Lego until I got what I wanted.

The base of the building contains a round-ish slab of XPS.  I don't have a circle cutting jig (it hasn't come up often enough to build one yet) so I traced this one out with a compass Pringles can and cut it out with my trusty wrong-handed OLFA knife.  This time around I drew the cobbles on the floor rather than using a textured rolling pin.  I felt like this was a small space and I wanted to have a circular pattern.  This completed the third goal.

The walls are pretty much what you'd expect and dipped into the billionty extra bricks I milled for day 12.  That build was supposed to be a heck of a lot taller but I got bored with it so I have lots sitting around.  Despite carving every stinking brick to shape there were still really big gaps but a lot fewer than last time.  I filled those again with the myriad random chips leftover from carving them.

This one was spendier than I expected and there were more than a few moments that I didn't think I was going to make it.  I'm glad i followed through with it since I think it looks pretty good but carving every brick and every shingle really sucked.  I still like the idea of building structures out of bricks but I think this build has steered me away from round structures built out of bricks.  Tomorrow should be an uninteresting painting job and maybe getting started on day 29's build.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 26

More painting today, this time minis, and I hear what you're thinking anonymous reader, "most of those are just tiny things."  Yes, yes, they are.  They're still minis, though and they still need paint.  I note that my setup isn't fantastic for photos.  If I'm ambitious tomorrow, I may try to fix some lighting.  Today's total is 15 figs in like 7 hours and thankfully clears some clutter off my crafting area.

These doods are goblins.  Specifically Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures Goblins.  I like these sculpts quite a lot.  They look like they mean business.  I didn't clean these up as much as I should have before painting so they aren't as nice as they might have been.  I tried to limit the number of colors to go faster so these and the next guys are all dressed in the same colors.  Must be embarrassing.

These guys are also Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures, this time Kobolds.  They match my other kobolds and are also dressed in the same colors.  I had to mix a wash (gasp) since they're turquoise and I didn't have one.  I don't like Army Painter paints all that much even though I use them frequently.  Their washes on the other hand are fabulous.

Yep, these guys are here and didn't take a ton of effort to paint.  Like I said before, they needed paint and they're miniatures so they count toward my total.  The two panthers and three purple-based spider swarms are from the Legend of Drizzt Boardgame.  The other two Spider Swarms and two Rat Swarms are Reaper Bones.  They were mostly airbrushed.

2019 finished mini counter:  29/100

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 25

Yep, we're painting today.  This is a lot more complicated than normal buildings because a) it's big, b) it's complicated, and c) it separates into four pieces.  I was not helped by having a splitting headache, either.

I cheated again and airbrushed the roof and two wood floor surfaces.  The roof is mixed brown and red and the floor is just brown.  I'm using my Badger Minitaire paints which are significantly more expensive but I really didn't want to deal with cleaning up after throwing craft paint through my airbrush.  I'm not sure what it is, but I really like look of the airbrush base coats over the mod podge primer.  It's also a heck of a lot faster.

I picked out individual stones in the walls in three colors and did the same two-tone base flags and pavement as usual.  The pillars return to their customary position on the pavement base.  I did quite a lot of drybrushing this time around with not quite as large differences.  The color choices on the roof in particular is fairly subtle but that's what I wanted.  The new wash went over everything but the roof.  I think it dried a little heavy on the stonework and I made a real mess of it trying to pull some of it off.

I had serious reservations about going with the light turquoise walls if I'm honest.  The idea came from photographic evidence of a similar building in the same color scheme.  I'm not sure how well the warm roof and cool walls works but I went with it anyway.  I'm kind of bored with the off-white walls.


Just like the rest of this project, painting was a serious effort.  Even with the airbrushing and generally forgiving builds (the dormers were a significant exception) it still took around six hours not including drying time.  Twenty-four-ish hours seems like a big expenditure but I think the result is good even if I did screw up the wash.  Tomorrow will probably be something less difficult.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 24: tavern #2

Today completes the second tavern in all of its complexity.  It's a serious build with a serious roof which took a serious amount of effort.  I learned a bunch of stuff here and I even did some maths.  Terrifying.

In very basic terms, this is a modular roof.  I built one of these on day 15 though it feels like months ago.  Complicating this one is that it's much larger (twice the size, actually) which means that large pieces of foam bend and warp and generally don't behave.  I did a bunch of measurements and scale drawings because I didn't think I could wing it.  I'd find out that I was correct so I got that going for me. 

This is a story about complications.  Most of those stem from doing things on autopilot which didn't work and mis-transcribing some of my measurements and making a bunch of really bad cuts.  I though "wow, there should be an overhang on the roof!"  Except I forgot that this one had pitches on all sides.  Then I fiddled with the side pieces and realized they didn't fit once I had the wall standins glued in (the pieces that hold onto the base).  Some shaving and whittling later, I had side pieces that almost fit but that I bodged together enough to glue.  It all got covered with shingles anyway.

Another thing that I should have put more thought into are the window...thingies...damnit...dormers.  I had a sensible plan to start:  two facing the road.  I was pretty sure the placement was good due to planning.  When I started building this morning I thought, "heck, why not build two on the other side too?  How hard could it be?"  Yeah. 

One thing that didn't go badly was the structure of the thing.  I did a lot of measuring and fitting to ensure that it wouldn't warp badly when being glued.  I also got the pitch of the roof right (45 degrees) which made a lot of stuff easier.  There's a good deal of reinforcing and that kind of thing and the result is a solid piece in as much as any building made out of foam ever is.  I also didn't forget the chimney so no one has to freeze to death. 

Shingling, as one might predict, was a freakin' nightmare.  The dormers look good at their current location but shingling between them was a real mess.  The overhangs on the dormer roofs (gabled, I believe) make this harder yet.  Shingling including the cardboard pieces ended up at four hours which is way longer than I'd expected. 

This is pretty much all I did today.  It was way more complicated than I'd anticipated and I expected a lot.  Seven hours yesterday, nine hours today, and probably two hours planning things out in paint.net puts this at eighteen prior to painting.  If we account for some of the bad missteps and refining the roof structure construction some, I could see this reducing but I don't think by much.  There's just a lot of crap that needs effort.  The result is good, though, and I think it'll look better painted.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 23

We're stepping back from the speed builds for the next two days so we can build something big and with good detail.  This is part of another tavern, cleverly called "tavern 2" in my notes and includes the base, the second floor, and....[drum roll please]...the third playable floor base.  The roof should arrive tomorrow.  I would have liked to have had the entire build complete for a big reveal but I've got other obligations today and I want to do something really complicated.  Because I like pain.  Apparently.

The posts go with the bottom this time because painting was such a stinking hassle yesterday.  I do like the toothpick thing and I'm thinking I should do that every time there are free-standing posts.  It makes me wish the base had a thicker piece of foam.  If we think back to tavern #1 way back on day 5 it was two pieces of much thicker XPS glued together with a thick slab on top.  The base of this one is two super thin pieces of XPS glued to a piece of medium weight chipboard with a thin slab on top.

The XPS on the base is textured pretty much exactly like the last one with the Green Stuff World rolling pins.  The walls are hand-textured with a pen just like day 21.  The floor platform for the second floor is similarly a pair of thin slabs glued together with beams sticking out just far enough to show properly.  That means that the floor itself wasn't super well supported and ended up being extra flimsy.  I fixed this with craft sticks underneath.  I also remembered that day 21's beams were exposed in the underneath area and a pain to paint so I covered them up with timbers so I wouldn't have to deal with it.  This construction is pretty solid and weighty which means that heavy metal minis standing on the overhang are less likely to topple it over.

The playable foundation for floor #3 is pretty much the same as floor #2 without the need to overhang anything.  As such its construction is a lot less complicated but still reinforced with crafting sticks.  The playable slab doesn't fit on top of the wall--it's the same size as the one below, so it has to be sitting on platforms.  So I dutifully made a bunch of platforms and then screwed up gluing the slab to them.  Turns out that I didn't have time to reposition before the hot glue cured so I had to pull the whole thing off again.  That sucked.  For next time, I'm going to limit the number of glue points on the original...err...gluing, then reinforce after the fact.  That worked out much better.  There's some fixup to avoid showing gaps between the slab and walls which shouldn't be a problem once it's primed and painted.

So far, minus my dumb blunders, it's turned out pretty much how I want it.  I think we're up to seven hours of build time so far but unlike normal, I didn't take good notes.  Tomorrow, though, the real pain begins.  I even did maths.  The horror.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 22

Today, predictably, was a day of painting.  I also got ahead on tomorrow's build which is good because I have stuff going on tomorrow.  Painting wasn't difficult but then again it hasn't been since I started drawing timbers.

My new wash isn't as dark as the old so I didn't paint the stones as cartoony as last time.  I also toned down the drybrushing on the wood and stone for the same reason.  The flags are supposed to be sandstone or something like that but I don't think it came through.  And if you were looking for another reason to not like the posts being attached to the upper floor:  it made the front really painful to paint.

While I like the look of the antique white (or was it vanilla ice cream?) walls, I wanted to try something more bold.  I imagine this building as a merchant's shop with living quarters and extra rooms on the second floor.  It makes sense that they'd want to paint their building in an unusual color to attract attention so I went with an earthy red + off white which turned out more like a peach color.  I don't hate it but it contrasts weirdly with the dark blue roof.  I don't think it's quite as garish in person.

Overall I think this was a good build and probably the best executed paint job even with questionable color choices.  With the three-ish hours of painting the total build + paint time is around eight hours and I think it's some of my best work. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 21

At this point I've built a bunch of buildings and mostly sated my need for them.  Also, storage is starting to be an issue.  Glam shot today has too small a background because I had to cut up the big piece of Readi-board for the roof.  I'll get more soon. 

I've done a lot to speed up my building in the last N builds which means that spending more time should result in higher quality.  I liked the tavern build way back on day 5 (that was more than two weeks ago!) and kind of want a few buildings with overhangs like that to build a nice street scene.

You folks know the drill by now.  These are hot glued with a mix of built timbers and drawn timbers and drawn stonework.  I think the stonework is starting to look good, probably because I've drawn so many of these.  While I dislike how long it takes, I think the result is good and beats the crap out of the other ideas I had to get the same effect.

The roof is the normal foamcore.  I raised it more than I wanted; I was aiming for a 90 degree peak but didn't do the math and it's slightly less.  I also switched to 3/4" width shingles as an experiment but I don't think I like them--they seem way too big.  I remembered the chimney, too, so there's that.

This time around I put the pillars with the top and drove a toothpick through it for strength.  This pokes into the top and through the length of the pillar so we'll see how well that works.  I think I already don't like this because its location isn't clear when the roof comes off so anyone trying to hide behind is imprecise at best.

Total build time including the priming is right around five hours and I think it's a good result.  I expect painting to be fewer than four hours which should happen tomorrow.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 20: shacks

This is a build I've wanted to do for a while.  My current campaign takes place in a city that has a lot of these kinds of buildings.  They're pretty much what you'd expect:  a bunch of pieces of textured foam glued together in seemingly random ways.  There are a few coffee stirrer pieces in there for structure but they still ended up being kind of flimsy.

Other than looking ramshackle, I wanted these to look quite old and beat up which means "warm tones weathered in grey".  I imagine these kinds of shacks being made with whatever came to hand and not built from premium wood like oak. 

I cheated this one.  I airbrushed the base coat of 2:1 brown to yellow at a coverage of something like 40%.  I was surprised how well it already sold the weathered dirty look.  After that we're back to drybrushing craft paints, first a dark, then a light.  This punched the whole thing up a notch.  I finished with a coat of my old dark wash mixed with matte medium laid on pretty heavily.  I probably put the wash on too heavily or should have drybrushed with the lighter grey more heavily. 

I like these kinds of builds because they can eat up the random scraps I seem to always have littering my workspace.  I think the double texturing really worked for weathered and beaten planks.  This was done first with the usual a fine-toothed comb then with with the wire brush.  I started with PVA but got really unhappy with it and switched to hot glue.  While I like the look of the not-straight planks, they were a goddamn pain to prime.


Overall I think the results are good even if they are somewhat flimsy.  I'm tempted to build a few more but I'll probably wait until I've needed more than the four I've got.  I might lighten them up a bit if I try it again; they're kind of dark.  Total build time and painting, vastly aided by using the airbrush, was complete in about three hours.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 19: speed build

I like the 3D-ness of built timbers but I like the speed and expressiveness of drawing texturing with a pen.  I don't much like having to use PVA to glue walls and I haven't yet gotten precision enough cuts/gluing to not look bad.  The question is:  why not both?

This is a modular second floor usable for just about any of the similarly sized half-timbered buildings like the one on day 15.  If you've been following along with my other builds then you pretty much know what happened here.  Mixing the two techniques looks like a best of both worlds situation.  I didn't use terribly many timbers here but still got to hide my terrible gluing gaps and didn't have to wait forever for things to dry except the hated, hated shingles.  The entire thing (shingles and all) was slapped together and painted in under four hours and that included milling a bunch of shingles because somehow I'd run out.

In other news, I finally bought some proper matte medium and flow medium and made a proper wash.  I forgot to buy a proper black ink so I used the far more expensive Vallejo ink.  I've talked about this before and I have to say, it makes a pretty big difference.  I ended up with something that behaves quite a lot like Nuln Oil.  This is encouraging because the ink I did buy was an umber for something that I hope works a lot like Agrax Earthhade.  Even using matte medium in the previous wash made it more viable. 

I'm not sure how much faster these can get without significantly changing something up.  Rough maths (sorry) imply that moving from 0.5"x0.75" to 0.75"x1" shingles would have the number required and they probably wouldn't need to be quite as thin and just might stay inside the bin.  BMC's live edge roof planking would certainly be faster, too, though I like the look a lot less.  Next time, maybe.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 18: thatched cottage

Underwhelming, if I'm honest.

Today we have something for Trogdor:  a thatched roof cottage.  I have to admit that I had no idea what a thatched roof was other than it went on top of a building and summoned The Burninator.  It turns out they're really interesting.  It all started a couple of weeks ago when The Crafting Muse's thatched roof tutorial popped up in my youtube suggestions.  "Wow," past me thought, "that looks cool but what a pain in the butt."  Landvaettr improved upon this significantly.  The basic gist here is that we simulate the thatching (reeds or some such) by using lengths of twine that we unwind and put down in layers.

Yep, that's a mess.

Landvaettr's method is to wrap the twine around a length of something, hot glue across the width of the roof on both sides, then cut across to make two strips.  In a better world these strands would all be straight.  In this world I used twine and should have spent the time to unwind each length.  I didn't.  I sort of cheated it with a pair of the combs I texture stuff with.  It almost worked and I messed up both combs.  It also made a giant mess and kicked up a ton of dust.  So now I have dust and twine fibers all over my crafting station.

I did not forget the chimney this time.

The rest of the building is a pretty standard construction.  I hand-textured the walls with something resembling field stone (my favorite) while watching things on the youtubes.  This is PVA glued like the last one and I still didn't get the walls glued correctly but mostly covered up the issues with Mod Podge and paint.  Building the sides with foamcore instead of XPS is a tradeoff and I don't think a great one.  Taking the paper off means it's really flimsy.  Leaving the paper on like I did means that anything it glues against has a bad texture which looks terrible.

I think this kind of pen texturing works best when it's exaggerated and cartoony so the original colors are pretty bright.  That got muted a bit with the drybrushing and again with the black wash.  I spent more time than usual painting the stonework which I think is completely overshone by the roofing material and the perhaps too muted by the wash.  I'm sure I'll do that again but probably cartoonier and hopefully with a better result.

The pen texturing is by far the spendiest part of this whole thing.  Without doing a lot of terrible maths, the total build time (sans drying) was around 5 hours.  That includes an hour and change for texturing with a pen, another hour and change painting the stone work, and an hour dealing with the crazy thatching thing.

I'm pretty sure I could do all of that faster were I to try it again, but honestly I'm not sold on the thatching.  It's not faster than shingles and I don't think it looks particularly good.  If I were to try it again with the same technique I'd probably try to use more strips since the part that we recognize as thatching (in the European traditions, anyway) is the ends of the reeds, not the lengths.  This looks more like a south seas bungalow or something.  For now I'ma mark it off my list and maybe seal it with a dullcoat so I don't get fibers everywhere.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 17

I've got a lot of stuff going on this week so I'm having to pipeline some of the work for the next few days.  Today's thing is thus the expected painting of the last build, pictured right. 

Two things have become apparent.  First, the pen texturing on the timbers is a lot more random and IMO, better looking than solely texturing with a comb.  Second, it's been way easier to paint.  A minor bonus is taking up less paint.  I took more time to paint as I went and I think the outcome is better as a result.  Easier to paint + more accurate -> probably a good choice even though it's a lot less fun to build.  There are a couple details I'd like to make better for next time. 

Drybrushing really worked well here.

One bad thing is that my gluing wasn't as good as I'd hoped and there are a couple of bad seams on the walls.  Those weren't covered over with the Mod Podge or the paint so that's not the best.  The next building also has PVA glued walls so hopefully I can improve on that part of it. 

The jettying on the roof doesn't look quite right but it's kind of a stand in anyway so I'm not that bothered about it.  Someday I'll probably build a second floor for it, maybe later this week.  Also, the chimney is missing.  I made sure that the next building will have one so not everyone will freeze to death.

Total paint time including the Mod Podge coat was just over two hours.  So just under four hours plus just over two hours sounds a lot like right around six hours total build and paint time.  That's approaching something reasonable.  I'd like to get the build and paint time down to right around four hours for a single story building not including drying time.  It'll be interesting to compare the ending build+paint times at the end of the 30 days and the beginning. 

Shoe's 30 for 30: day 16

I've other obligations today so this is kind of a filler post.  In the downtime of waiting for the hot glue gun to warm up, PVA to set enough to handle, or any of various time I need to slow my roll for 5 to 10 minutes, I like having a second smaller thing I can work on.  Bonus points if that thing can suck up some of the random scraps that inevitably get leftover from whatever big things I've been working on.  Welp, today's thing is both of those.

These are simple scatter crates.  They're pretty much what you might expect:  a core of XPS with coffee stirrers glued to the sides.  These use up small cuts of XPS and the random little bits of leftover textured coffee stirrers I have laying around.  It also means I get to replace the relatively boring Lego standins I've been using for the last like three years which you can see here with the cart they came in on.


I started washing these with my favorite Agrax Earthshade but didn't think they turned out very well.  Instead, I washed with my lousy brown wash which in this case did OK.  A light craft paint drybrush rounds them out.  If I'm honest, I think the painting is the low point on these so next time around I'll probably think that through a little better. 

If you wanted to poke some nail holes in each plank to add to the realism, that would also be appropriate, probably before washing.  Tomorrow we should be back to the normal insanity though I'm really wanting to paint some minis.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 15

Today we have a similar half timbered building to the last few, though only the first story, base, and top floor with attendant modular roof.  This time around I'm handling the timbers as texturing rather than building.  It sounds straightforward and it turned out to be. 

Texturing with a pen isn't super bad, it's just time consuming and a heck of a lot less fun.  The wall texture wouldn't have been so bad if I'd remembered to do it before things were glued.  Since I wasn't able to hide seams with faux timbers I made some precision cuts and glued with PVA instead of hot glue.  I don't like using PVA for this--it cures far too slowly but if you don't want an easily measurable gap at your seams, it's a better choice than hot glue. 

The top floor is pretty much the same construction as it was in the previous build.  It's a thin slab of XPS with some beams glued to it then stuck on top of the existing walls.  Texturing on the beams was done with a comb as per usual and they run the full width of the slab.  I'm liking this better than embellishing the supporting beams after the fact.  For some reason I made the door modular though I'm not sure why. 

As an added bonus, I experimented with a modular roof which could itself stand in as a rooftop.  It fits on the normal 3 7/8" x 5 7/8" textured floor base.  In retrospect I should have fired up the hot glue gun to slap together the roof instead of dealing with slow curing PVA.  As a result the construction is slightly wonky since I couldn't weight anything down.  I'm hoping it stiffens up with the mod podge coating whenever I get to painting it.

The base is probably slightly too large.  I'll probably shave a quarter of an inch off width and length next time up.  I also forgot to put a chimney on it...again.  I've got a pile of the right size blanks already textured, even. 

Overall this build wasn't super expensive.  Hated shingling included and not including dry times, it was a little over four hours.  Including a second story wouldn't have increased the cost significantly so I'm thinking this is a better choice for speed builds.  I'm a little surprised by that.  I would have expected the pen work to be a lot spendier.  I'm not sure how well that texturing for will work out but since I wasn't super ambitious today, I can 't show it painted. 

In other news, today marks the halfway point in this challenge.  I've painted 11 miniatures, built 5 pieces of scatter terrain, published 1 article, and built 6 buildings.  Quite a pile of stuff--storage is starting to be a problem.  Tomorrow will be something simple, probably. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 14

Shingles are still bullshit.

Today was a day of painting and as such I'll show a finished shot and that's pretty much it.  I didn't wash the shingles this time around and I was a little more careful with the non-timber walls.  I think this is one of the better paint jobs I've done.  All told we're around 4 hours of painting which puts the total build time at under 10 hours. 

While I like the challenge of completing a thing per day, I think it limits what's possible.  There aren't many larger builds I'd be super compelled to do but with more time I feel like I could embellish a little more and maybe put a little more thought into things.  Maybe the last couple builds will be simpler things where I spend more time on paint and details and stuff.  I also want to experiment on the next half timbered building doing the texturing by hand instead of by build which is more in line with how these building actually are. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 13: modularity attacks

Ok, we've done a few of these, now.  Let's build upon what we've learned.  I wanted to establish three things today.  First, let's build the floor on top of the jettying correctly.  This will necessarily raise the height of the second floor but I don't think that's a problem.  Second, let's standardize the floor sizes for at least some of the floors so they can be interchangeable.  Third, lets look into being able to modularize some standard parts so our standins work better.  While I really like building stuff, playability is important, too, and the best way to ensure a build is used as often as possible is to make it usable for multiple things.

Starting with the 2x3 tile size from the merchant house, the upper floor plan is 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches which is right about where it should be.  The last eighth of an inch in either direction is probably due to my sloppy measuring or a Proxxon set at too high a temperature.  The bottom floors are pretty hopeless and they don't need to be compatible with each other anyway, so we don't care about those.  So we're going to start building 2x3 buildings with the second floor at this size and this time around have a cartoonishly large jetty.  Other parts of the build are pretty much the same as always.  "Always" in this case being the roughly five weeks since I got my Proxxon and started making buildings. 

Remember how way back on day 3 I said that each piece of the building could be a standin except that some of them looked funny without doors?  Well, we can freakin' fix that, too.  I've been punching out the window and door holes with a hobby knife.  This has been getting easier as I learn how to work with the material better, and the walls keep getting thinner.  A new hobby knife blade didn't hurt either.  The cross stitch mesh windows don't usually even get glued in--they're held in by friction the same as most of my doors.  This got me thinkin'.  What if we made the doors and windows modular?

So here we go down the rabbit hole.  As long as the dimensions are correct there isn't going to be any issue popping doors and probably their immediate timbers out of a wall and replacing the whole thing with a different piece.  As an added bonus, we don't need to do this for every window/door combo; only the ones we might want to replace.  I've been varying the window size from 1"x1" to 0.75"x0.75" to 0.5"x0.5" to fit the building so we'll limit ourselves to the large windows in this scheme since it's also the width of the door.  All large windows have been framed at least on the left and right by timbers and those are already standard sizes.  Timbers above should stay right where they are. 

Overall this was all more complicated than I expected and required a lot of measuring.  The result is still good, though and didn't take too long.  Including milling, measuring, and shingles (still bullshit) we're at 6 hours.  It's starting to look like 4 or 5 hours is the limit for one of these two story jobs with this methodology.  Maybe next build we can look at trying to significantly reduce this.  Tomorrow:  painting.