Not as a-door-able as I hoped for.

In my last crafting-related post, among the photos was a glimpse at some doors I was working on. They’re more or less finished now, though they’re… well, usable but not really what I’d hoped for. I tried to make a few variations of something akin to DM Scotty’s openable doors, but with the actual doors made from cut-up coffee stirrers.

Clearly not a carpenter

I had a hard time getting the little wooden dowels to go into the foam without tearing it up, so even where I’d intended to leave the foam exposed to texture and paint as stone, I had to reinforce it with more coffee stirrers. I totally forgot to roll a wad of foil across the foam surfaces to give them texture. After applying a wash which seemed after a few minutes to be setting in evenly, I left them to dry unattended for a while… and came back to find the wash had pooled in places, leaving permanent “puddles” in spots. A couple of them lean forward a little, causing them to look somewhat angular when viewed from the wrong direction (see the far right on on the photo below).

Oh, and at this point I’m afraid to try to open the doors.

So I’m not ecstatic about the results. But, really… they’re not that bad, either. Certainly better looking than the lopsided rectangles I currently draw on my battle mat to depict doors.

I also bought some little tiny metallic circles from the jewelry section of a craft store to potentially glue on to serve visually as pulls/latches, but I haven’t tried attaching them yet. I think for now I’ll use these as is, in the hopes of building some better ones in the future as I get more experience with this crafting stuff.

The walls are closing in!

The style of dungeon tiles I’ve gone with so far is the wall-less variety, because it seems to me that having walls all over the place would impair visibility and get in the way of easily moving minis around on the gaming surface. However, I can envision uses for the occasional wall, such as instances where two adjacent rooms butt up against one another and it’s difficult to depict that there’s a wall there without, well, a wall there.

So I decided to create a few small strips of wall for such occasions. Because most of my tiles are in sizes where at least one side is an increment of 3″, I cut some 3″ wide by 1.5″ tall strips out of a piece of dollar-store foam core board. I peeled the paper off both sides and hand-drew some brick shapes on them with a pen, trying to press hard enough to create a little texture. Even after my experience with the doors, I’m still not completely used to the relative fragility of this type of foam, and some of my lines created what looked like unsightly little jagged rips around the edges of the bricks. I pressed on with them anyway.

I glued them to bases made from crafting sticks – basically wider, flatter popsicle sticks – and black-mod-podged them as a strengthening base coat.

At which point I realized I had again forgotten to roll the tin foil across the surface for texture. Oh well.

I painted them using the same dark-gray-coating, light-grey dry brush technique and colors as I’ve been using on my tiles. They looked decent, except the jagged bits I mentioned above didn’t look much like something that would occur on actual stone. I decided this would be the perfect time to finally experiment with a little of the flocking I’d picked up a few weeks ago. Some white glue and a sprinkle of fuzzy green stuff, and I ended up with these:

The walls have a little bit of moss or algae on them, which grew very conveniently in the worst-looking crevices!

Next time: The beginnings of outdoor scenery!