Yeah, I know, my next thing was supposed to be the chest of drawers… I’ll get to that.
In the meantime I just had to make this pile o’ skulls…
(Using my phone cam… need to get a camera of my own…)
The “smiling skull” is a sort of optical thing, it wasn’t intended to be a happy face… But then again, skulls do seem to be smiling from some angles naturally.
rpgobsessed 
Love the skull pile…
Treasure pile next? 😀
Heh… just a quick comment, my phone camera sucks, and this photo itself sucks from the angle it’s taken. I think the pile o’ skulls is not bad looking in real life.
Yeah, a treasure pile is coming. Just gotta figure out the best way to pull that off. Send me more ideas too.
Right now my brain is all wrapped around how to make barrels. It seems that barrel making with real wood slats can’t possibly be that difficult, after all people have been making barrels for thousands of years. I started a prototype last night, but I made it too narrow.
I’m trying to decide if I should make a bunch of real wooden barrels, or make just one and then mold it and cast copies… probably the latter if I can get a good enough prototype.
But then again, if I want to make some big beer and ale barrels to create a bar scene, those barrels would take a ton of casting material and that stuff ain’t cheap, while the wood slats I use (coffee stirring sticks) actually ARE real cheap. So… I may cast copies of standard barrels and make actual huge barrels.
So far my terrain experiment has produced the following:
15 wooden tables of various sizes.
17 chests of drawers (I have three wooden ones I haven’t photographed yet)
1 pile o’ skulls
1 half-finished prototype barrel
5 small epoxy putty barrels (solid, not usable as containers)
4 small treasure chests
2 benches
2 crates
And I think a couple other things… I’m getting there..
What about a “single-piece” barrel with the slat detail painted on?
Arg… how lame… That’s essentially what my five epoxy putty barrels are. I haven’t painted or photographed them yet, perhaps tonight. I’m not real thrilled with them.
I don’t really want to kill myself trying for Reaper-like quality and detail on my miniatures, or Dwarven-forge quality and detail on my terrain, but I do want to make some effort to have them be more than just garbage… I could easily make barrels out of cereal box cardboard and paint them if I wanted to….
Hmm….. Actually…. I could make a cereal box cardboard barrel, then cut slats and glue them on the barrel and that might give both the shape and detail I’m looking for much easier than trying to shape and carve wood…..
Cheap, easy and halfway decent looking…. that’s pretty much my stated modus operandi here…
There you go!
When do we get to see it all laid out? And when do I get to borrow the set?
“GoldenTerrains – Collection #1”
Heh… I wonder how realistic it would be to use toilet paper rolls to make barrels…. Seems like it might work. But then again…. fiddling around with some paper I have discovered that it’s trickier than it seems to make symmetrical barrels. Paper tends to want to maintain a straight orientation, and the curves you need to cut into the “staves” to get the paper to smoothly form a barrel shape are more complex than it might seem at first glance. It’s not too hard to make a “barrel” that is essentially a middle section with two conical end sections, but that’s not a traditional barrel shape. Barrels have a convex curve to them which requires a smoothly curved cut into each stave such that the barrel staves are only bent inwards towards the longitudinal “center” of the barrel. If the cut is straight, then the barrel has no “belly” it just becomes two cones joined together…
Coopers have a barrel stave template which they use to cut each stave (which includes a vertical taper as well so the staves remain flush and have a smooth seam through the thickness of the staves).
I am beginning to see why barrel making was an actual trade. It’s not nearly as easy to make a barrel as you might think.