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.