My crafting “things to try” list at this point far exceeds the amount of time I can reasonably dedicate to it. For the big projects – towers, terrain pieces, tile sets, and the like – I tend to pause for a while when I finish one or two significant steps and get back to them after a day or two during which I attend to all the stuff in life that interferes with playing around.
But I almost always have a small project or two underway at the same time, often making little decorative items with the intention of adding them to future builds and scenes. Usually these don’t seem complicated enough to warrant a separate post, and sometimes I forget to adequately document them along the way even if I wanted to. While a post-per-mini-project doesn’t seem warranted, I’ve decided to start a series under the title “Bits and Pieces” where I’ll be documenting some of these smaller efforts two or three at a time.
Today’s topics: books and scrolls.
Just Keep Scrolling
Basic scrolls are pretty quick and easy to make. I started from this Wyloch video. I made a bunch of rolled-up scrolls and a few open ones using some old card stock printer paper and hot glue. In retrospect I should have used super glue instead, because of the spider web of little strings that became threaded through my pile of tiny, lightweight objects, so that when I picked up one, five to ten more went airborne. Several were flung off to parts unknown and still haven’t been located.
Following the recommendations from the video, I coated them in brown and then a parchment color. I varied the thickness of the parchment coat to create a little variety in the overall look.
The twine I had around was old, waxy, and brittle, so I only ended up making a few with that. For more of them I added a dab of hot glue to serve as a wax seal, and the rest were left unadorned as if they were frequently or recently used and therefore not sealed. I dabbed the “wax” dots with a few different paint colors.
With twenty or so scrolls done, I tossed them into a plastic sandwich bag to quietly await the creation of desks and bookshelves for them to lay on.
One can never have too many books!
I’d planned to start making some books based on some combination of similar techniques from the Wyloch video linked above and this one from TheDMGInfo. But literally just a few minutes before I intended to get started, I ran across a Facebook post linking to this video and its related template (also linked from the video description). It seemed a little bit like cheating to use a printed template, but there was no way I was going to achieve so many variations and details with my sad, sad painting skills, so I gave in to temptation.
I didn’t want the books to be all of uniform size and thickness, so after cutting a piece of foamcore and printing the template in its default size for that, I reduced the image by 15% and printed that as well. As the filler for the smaller books, I used my hot wire cutter to mill a piece of scrap XPS into a few sheets about 1/16″ thinner than the foamcore.
Next step was to cut out the strips from the printed templates and carefully glue-stick them around the ends of the foam pieces so that the spines of the books rested on the edges. After a bit of drying time, I used a straight edge to cut out the book strips, then glued some more template parts onto the newly exposed foam. Eventually, I had these:
So next I started slicing them up into individual books. As I did so, I found that they often seemed more square-ish than books tend to. Not sure if this was due to some print setting – maybe the original was sized for A4 paper, rather than US letter size? (I’m also now convinced I glued one of the full-size templates to one of the thinner XPS sheets, because a few of them ended up deeper than they were tall. Oops.)
Ultimately this wasn’t a big deal, because for some of them (where the print pattern allowed) I could trim off a little extra from the back, and mostly they’re destined to be stacked in shelves where it won’t be noticeable anyway. If you’re going to try this and are worried about the sizes, I recommend doing a test print in black and white and cutting a couple of the book covers out to see if the height-to-depth is acceptable.
Slicing complete, I had a big pile of books. But the foamcore ones had pure-white internals, and the XPS ones had green! Both also lacked any texture to make the pages look like, well, pages.
So I went through all the books used an Xacto knife to score little shallow lines in the sides to add texture. A painted all the page sides with a parchment color, taking care not to get any on the book covers but not being entirely successful – I was listening to a “Critical Role” episode where Matt was doing the voice of the black powder salesman… so my laughter was making my hands shake. Oh well… the parchment-daubed sides will just have to go into bookshelves to hide them.
After the parchment color dried, the page texture still wasn’t really showing, so I carefully daubed all the page sides with a black wash. Again I had a few problems with the covers being damaged, this time because the wash touched them and soaked into the paper. Did I mention how easy it will be to hide the discolored ones by putting them side to side in bookshelves?
The wash really helped the books to look more like books, though. Up close as in the picture above you can see some of the foam texture as well, but from a little further away it does a pretty good approximation of stack of paper.
Into the Bag of Holding Stuff To Glue To Furniture with you, book pile!