I haven't built a building for a long time. In fact, the last one was way back in May of 2019 in the first iteration of A Thing A Week Weekly Challenge. By the time this article goes to print it will have been nearly two years. Also, future perfect tense--triple sentence score! I've learned a lot about working with foam in that time so it was instructive to revisit the topic. Note that buildings take up a lot of space compared to miniatures and I'm going to need to rethink my storage solution.
I had two goals and (spoilers) I got both. First, I wanted to experiment with magnetizing the different floors which would sidestep some difficult high-precision crafting with low-precision materials. This worked out OK. Second, I wanted a curved roof. This was less OK than I would have liked but that's how you learn, right? Construction was pretty typical and was completed within a couple days. Painting stretched out for the next couple days but wasn't particularly difficult.
The base is a piece of
Readi-Board foam core hit with a texture roller and glued to piece of chipboard. I couldn't work out how to get either a magnet or a nail into the base without a mess so I kept the friction-fit build. The walls are a quarter inch by two inch tall XPS textured with a ballpoint pen. The windows and modular portals are cut out with an exacto. The second floor is the same foam core hit with a different texture roller. The walls are reinforced with craft sticks and I was not super careful when gluing them together so they're not as square as I'd like.
The magnetic mechanism is basically short roofing nails driven into the corners of the second floor. They attach to small 3x2mm magnets glued into the second floor's surface. I started gluing stuff together with PVA with the intent of keeping the seams tight. This was a mistake, though I did need to use PVA to glue the magnets in and for shingles as per usual. Once I switched to using hot glue, everything sped up and generally things went better.
The roof was by far the most complicated part of this build. I had the two roof surfaces cut to size already. I settled upon throwing a beam at the top pretty quickly and settled upon freehanding curved A-frames from drawn patterns on foam core. To these I glued XPS chunks for attach points and glued the roof surface to it. I wasn't as careful as I needed and the place they meet at the top isn't straight and there's a very noticeable bow in it. I probably needed a larger beam since it doesn't hide the tops of the shingles. The fascia on the front of the roof surface is also not straight though it's a lot less noticeable.
Painting started with the typical coat of black craft paint +
Mod Podge and was followed by a basecoat of craft paint. I also drybrushed more starkly than usual with craft paint but instead of using my normal lousy ancient stinky washes I used real artist inks this time. Nutmeg brown + antique white drybrush hit with a coat of
Liquitex Raw Umber look
convincingly like preserved wood. I also used
Daler Rowney Red Earth and Daler Rowney Indigo for the mahogany themed floor on the second story and the blue slate on the ground floor respectively.
Overall, I think this is a good building and a good reprise of some skills that I haven't put into use for a long, long time.
2021 finished building counter: 2/5
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