Blog post 4

The 27^th Annual Creatin Contest  Part 2 – The Cottage

The dilapidated dragon cottage sprung from my imagination in a fully formed picture that I simply followed to completion.  I’m not great at sketching out a plan or considering where things should go, so I was lucky that everything just sort of came together.

As always at the start of a new project, I started a Pinterest board online and began to collect and print inspiration pictures.  One of my main inspiration pics for the outside of the cottage was of the old Millhouse at Hobbiton.  I’ll add in a picture so you can see what I mean!

I started the building by gluing the main MDF body together and then went on to make the walls for the top half of the cottage.  Because I was intending to use a rigid foam product to create the bottom stone walls, I needed to build the upper walls out slightly to match the width.  I used foam core for the outside of all the walls and cardboard for the inside.  To build up the two half walls I used foam core glued together to the matching thickness.  I sealed all edges of the foam core pieces with brown paper – a trick I learned from a friend!  I made the roof with foam core also.

I then glued the timber framing pieces on, having stained and aged them all first.  The ‘plaster’ or daub was made by using Creative Paperclay following directions from the Techniques book by Rik Pierce.  I also followed his instructions to make the underlying wattle.  I Loved working with paperclay – I have since found so many different uses for it, if only it wasn’t so hard to find here in NZ!

For the bottom half of the buildings, I used a thin rigid foam product in which I carved in the lines to create the ‘rocks’ and then painted.  I loved the process of painting and aging the rocks although I’d doubt myself every time wondering if I could get it looking any good.  Thankfully always it seemed to come right.  I also created a heap of broken-down rocks out of the foam and painted in the same way.  Most of those are piled under the grass and greenery so you see the vague shapes but nature has crowded in over the stones.

I made the slate tiles of the basement out of polymer clay.  I made half pillars for holding up the main floor and some have deep grooves scratched into them from the dragon and blackened by fire.

Many of the fine details I put into the build are unseen as there are so many layers.  For me however, they needed to be there as they were part of the story.

I filled in the larger window from the kit and put a smaller window in it’s place.  I also changed out the door and added another window to the half chimney wall.  This was quite tricky to work out but I’m very happy with the result.

It took me two attempts to get the chimney right.  The first was just too big – in fact the chimney was a bit of an oversight.  While I knew the cottage needed a chimney I hadn’t planned for where it could go.  This is where making a preliminary sketch or plan would have come in handy.  I’m just lucky it worked out okay!

Once all the walls fitted – upper and lower, they were glued in place.  The half-floor I lined with planks – I also created the beams that would have held the floor up.  I endeavored to smash and break both floorboards and beams – although given how much time would have passed, growth etc would have covered so much of this, and indeed when I came to aging, many of these details were hidden and lost from view.

I’ll add in some photos of the process and in my next post I’ll talk more about the landscaping which was just as big a job as the building itself – if not more!

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments or questions below.

Rebecca xx