Shoe's 30 in 30, day 1

I've started building foam terrain recently; mostly buildings and other crap.  One Shoe K Markmaker has had this hang up about me doing 30 builds in 30 days.  Because I'm a free spirit and don't like following directions, I'm embarking on something a little different.  In spirit I'm doing 30 things in 30 days but I don't think it'll be solely terrain.

Here are the basic rules I plan on following:

• Finish one thing a day.  Some things take multiple days and some days are busy so relaxing this makes it a lot more manageable.  I also tend to work in batches for stuff like painting.  
• The thing can be any of these:
• terrain (building, scatter, props)
• painting a mini
• a writing that's at least a couple paragraphs long
• a physical or digital sketch
• The thing has to be posted here.  Bonus points if it's documented in some meaningful way.  

I kind of want to film and put some of the building parts on the youtubes but I'm getting ahead of myself.  If I can do this thing, not only will I finish 30 cool things (well, I hope they're cool anyway) but I'll rescue my post count for the rest of the year!  Also, my editing will probably be shit for these since I'm banging them out in a day.

30 in 30 Day 1

Mod podging done.  Yes, I verbed that.

Today's thing is a treasure chest prop.  I actually started yesterday.  We start with two half inch tall chunks of XPS and carve them with a hobby knife.  I carved out the interior space with the same hobby knife slightly on the top and much more on the bottom.  Both pieces got some love with a wire brush and pen to give the wood texture and a light brushing with BMC's mod podge and black paint base coat.  I like putting the base coat on the bottom too which necessitates propping pieces up on pins.

The bottom conceals a pair of very small machine screws that I got at the grocery store for mere pennies that have been hot glued down.  As a fun aside, insulation works!  The largeish blob of hot glue holding the screws in took a really long time to cool.

Painted and badly shot.

Next up we paint!  In preparation for future work, I cut two thin strips of cardboard and painted them with a dark metallic.  I don't like using mini paints on these because they're so much more expensive.  In this case, I broke my rule to get a color I like consisting of an Army Painter yellow I don't use super often and a brown coat.  I didn't drybrush this time around because I forgot  wanted to keep things dark.  That's all pretty standard stuff.  I first washed with my terrible brown wash which did almost nothing.  I ended up washing with Agrax Earthshade because it works really, really well.

Sealed, bound, and drying.

The plot thicks!  PVA glue secures a pile of hated, hated glitter both in gold and other colors to represent gems.  A selection of self-adhesive colored rhinestones also stand in as gems.  I painted up a couple extra mini swords for inclusion in the treasure pile.  This is all glued down and left to dry.  The last step locks everything down with clear nail polish available for a dollar at your local dollar store which also adds a really nice shine to the whole proceeding.

The metallic strips are cut to size and glued to the outside to represent iron bands or something.  The single bead for the lock seemed like a better idea than it did after I glued it on.

Day 1:  Complete

The final step (well, other than spraying) is to hot glue the top onto the bottom with the thing half open.  My hot glue gun is a terrible bad industrial strength thing with a not-very-precise nozzle.  That makes this kind of operation harder than it should be.  It doesn't show too badly on the table but in retrospect I probably should have started with the band connected on the top and back instead of trimming those individually.  I think the overall piece is OK and took (active time only--not counting drying) maybe 2 hours total.

In other news, glitter is now fucking everywhere on my crafting station.