Shingles (Phase 1)...

Guess who got a Firewire card for his temporary machine! Still haven't gotten round to repairing my workhorse, due to work commitments... So I took a look and found this amazing piece of kit. It even comes with some (limited) capture software. Good in a pinch and at the measly price.

It's time to talk about SHINGLES (not the disease!) people!

Some might say what you are about to see is overkill on the detail side of things... I say forget that! The more detail the BETTER!

SO... Let's get to it!

To make these shingles I needed several sheets of balsa wood (1.5mm thick), a crafting blade, some wood-stain (does what it says on the tin!) and a brush...


I cut the balsa wood in numerous strips of varied width. Then we gave each side (top and bottom) three coats of wood-stain. Kjestine applied the wood-stain at this stage. That was a slow job in itself, as she had to wait for one side's first coat to dry before doing the next side, and so on... But she did a great job.

When I cut the strips it obviously leaves perfect straight edges along the length, so my next step was to get in there and micro-detail the strips to give them the miniature hand-crafted look I keep harping on about (some visual detail on this later in the post). This left me with a load of strips with irregular widths and irregular edges...


...and some detail...


Next it was time to take each strip and slice it into irregular lengths of Shingle. It was important to do everything irregular to give a really dishevelled look to the cottage when it is complete...


Of course, now that I had cut the strips into shingles, they have more of those pesky sharp perfect edges on them... They HAD to be removed... One by one! This was a monster job and provides a good chance to show some detail of the micro-detailing mentioned previously... Cutting small irregular strips off the sharp edges of wood to give it an appearance of having been hewn by miniature men with miniature axes!

Thus...

...

...


So, now I had hundreds upon hundreds of individually hand-crafted wood shingles. Each one stained on the top and bottom, but not along the carefully detailed edges! So next came the process of giving each shingle a single coat of wood-stain around the un-treated edges...

...and a detail shot (check out my cheapo-crappy brush; I was loath to use a good one with wood-stain, and it did the job just fine)...


After they had all dried, I counted them, and found that I had PRECISELY 600 shingles. I hoped this would be enough to cover the entire roof surface (including the witch's hat roof-peaks). I was soon to be given a reality check, as it was now time to lay each of the shingles onto the roof structure of Fidget's cottage.

So, I got started...

...I applied a little glue to the bottom of the shingles and placed them onto the roof...


I had actually expected this whole process to be boring due to it's repetitive nature. However, in actually going through it, there is a sort of joy in taking so much care over something like this... knowing that every little effort you make will have a huge impact on the quality of the images that result in the finished film. I really enjoyed doing this!


It became clear, as I was about half-way through laying the available shingles, that there weren't going to be nearly enough to cover the entire roof...


So, I got as far as filling the main roof space with shingles. The witch's hat peaks are still bare, and I estimate I will need a further 400 shingles to complete the roof.

I have just got hold of a new batch of 1.5mm balsa wood, and I am raring to go! As soon as the shingles are complete I can get onto the windows and the door!

And, here is the cottage as it sits at the moment (sitting on my animation platform, which will be covered in a later post!).





Well, lots of detail... but it's been lot's of work!

Got to get back to work now... more updates coming soon! Check back often!