A Small Scene

This gold room box is started out as another commercially produced room boxes, like the one I turned into a dairy. Mom made two of these room boxes a number of years ago. She sold one, and I kept the other.

All the wood in this box was aged using watered down acrylic paints. The plaster walls are just white paint, thickened with a little baby powder.

The stone floor and steps was made from tan polymer clay, since we couldn't find paper clay. The clay was textured with wadded up tin-foil.

I keep this room box above my workspace. I've never decided on a permanent display. For a long time, it just held a random assortment of miniatures that I didn't want to get dusty. That seems to be a common theme of my room boxes, unfortunately! Now that I've cleared it off all the junk, I'd like to add a few details to finish out the scene. It won't take many accessories, but finding just the right ones may be a challenge!

I'm on the fence about the gold frame. I don't hate the gold, but I think painting it black (the way I did with the dairy) may make the whole thing that much better. Would you paint the frame or leave it gold?

Hundreds of Tiles Later...

Last time I promised to show my dairy project when I finished the tiling the walls. Well, it only took me about two weeks and 650 tiles!  Let's just say that I won't be using tiles again anytime soon.The tiles I chose aren't really appropriate for a dairy (they are much too elaborate) but I figured that for all the work of the room, I might as well use tiles I really liked.

There's still a lot to be done in the room, but the basic shell is finished. 

Please forgive me if this post is a little picture heavy. I'm so happy to be done with the tiles! I made so many tiles I thought for sure there would be extras, but I only had four border tiles left over at the end.

The stone floor is made of paper clay. It's looking a little too brown with all the blue and white. I may repaint it a little more grey.

I was very worried about keeping the tiles straight, so I tiled the walls first,and added the floor after. I made the mistake of gluing the door in first, and it ended up a little too far to the left, which made problems with the fit of the tiles. You can see that I had to add a tiny strip of partial tiles to the right hand corner to fill in the gap!

I'm still working on the door. I just repainted it slightly creamier white, and still need to add some subtle aging. I also need to add some sort of door latch or knob. The hinges I made out of thick paper. I was going to paint them to look like iron, but once I got the stone floor in I thought black hinges would look too dark in the room.

I also used my brother's pocket knife (don't tell him!) to widen the cracks between the boards. The "moulding" I used to make the door casing is just two pieces of layered cardboard.

The gallery room box I took apart to house my dairy had a really terrible gold frame. It was painted three different shades of gold, some matte and some shiny. But the paint job was hiding a decently shaped frame. So I taped off the inner most bands of beading, protected the inside of the box with a  piece of cardboard, and sprayed the frame mat black. I couldn't believe the difference it made!

Before...

After!

Feeling Blue (and White)

 I've been working on another project for the last week or so. For a while, I've been unhappy with the look of my gallery roombox, which sits on my worktop. I really threw the box together, and some of the shortcuts I took looked really bad. It was also in constant disarray. Usually, it had more paintings waiting to be hung than actually on the walls. It was definitely time for a change.

Since the gallery roombox idea hadn't worked out, I decided to try something completely different in the same box. I decided to make it into an old-fashioned dairy,with tiled walls and stone floors, such as you might find on an old English estate! I'm taking a few liberties with the design, but hopefully it will capture the feel. 

I'm not going to show the room yet. Suffice it to say that I have a long way to go. I'm still working on tiling the walls, and I'm undecided about the best way to get the look I want for the floor. In the mean time, I thought I'd show how I'm making the tiles...

First, I found images of old tiles I liked online.I re-sized them to be 1/2" square (the border tiles are 1/4" by 1/2") and fiddled with the colors until the tiles were approximately the same shades of blue and white. After that, I printed the tiles on watercolour paper. This particular pad of paper had a little too much tooth for my miniature paintings, but the heavy texture creates a realistic ripple effect in the tiles.

Next, I needed to create an easy system for "glazing" my tiles. I glued plastic 'pony' beads to a sturdy old piece of cardboard. I spaced the beads approximately 1" apart. Once the glue had dried, I placed tiny pieces of poster putty (aka blu-tack) on each bead. You can see the green putty on the bead in the background.

After that, it was a simple matter to cut the tiles apart one by one and stick them on beads. I used a drop of gloss medium to 'glaze' each tile, and let them dry for a few hours.When they were dry, I glued the tiles to another sheet of watercolour paper, using a square to keep the rows relatively straight.

 

Miniature Laquered Boxes

 I've always liked Russian lacquered boxes. I thought I'd try to make some in miniature. A circular box about 1 cm in diameter seemed a good size to start with.  The box on the right was my first attempt.  I had lots of trouble with this one. You can see that the finish isn't quite even, and I thought that it was a bit too tall. I tried to copy a Russian box which my mother owns for the picture on top. The painting on the first one also came out a bit dark. The traditional way to paint these is to gild the silhouette of the scene/figure first, and then paint over the top in thin layers. Since I was only trying to make these boxes look like their larger pieces, I just used a base coat of white paint to brighten the figure on the second box.

 I like the boxes best open. I'm going to have to try a few more of these. The basic box was easy enough to make from card stock, but I'm not happy with the simplicity of my paintings. I may try decoupage for the next set!