I made a paper pattern of the back of the fireplace. Then I rolled out scrap polymer clay, making sure the sheet was larger than my pattern, and used one of the impress molds I bought from Malcolm's Miniatures (via the Dutch dolls' house store Silly Sisters). I have quite a collection of these, now -- the one I picked was the Tudor brick -- these are longer and thinner than later bricks, and I thought it would give a nice detailed texture for the back of the big fireplace. English bond would have been okay, too.
My impressing is so very far from perfect, I almost crumbled it up and rerolled it, but I think after it's been painted and the fireplace has been filled with stuff, no one will notice my lousy work!
Then I baked the impressed sheet. It baked a little wiggly in the oven, as it tends to -- I find that if I glue it down really well, everything comes out okay. If you want to cut down on the wiggliness, then make your sheet of clay thicker and use more even pressure when impressing than I have here.
I cut it to shape using scissors (one of the wonderful things about impressing bricks into very thin sheets of polymer clay is that it's a cinch to trim).
Here it is, back in the fireplace, after it's been painted grey and then had its first dry brushings with cadmium red, raw sienna, burnt sienna and burnt umber. It now needs the detail work to bring out the grout, blacken the central bricks and so forth. In terms of sheer speediness, this technique is really great!
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Nina, I always take pictures of my work to check if I have missed something :). Yes, the camera is painfully honest when we want it to be :). As far as I am concerned though, real life is often flawed. Like your fireplace for eg, I have seen very old buildings and the bricks are never plastered perfectly :). Flaws are very necessary to achieve realism ..lol and when they are not, overcoming flaws brings out even more creativity. My 2 cents worth :)
ReplyDeleteIt looks really nice with all the flaws :) I agree with Sans, flaws make the minies realistic (or am I just trying to ensure myself to feel better of all my flawy minies LOL)
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the camera is mean, especially when you use macro - good looking stuff to the naked eye looks horrible as you see everything so clearly, sometimes it's quite shoking to see... That's why I don't use macro that often anymore :D
Have a nice week,
Ira
I like it! NIce job, it looks so real. If you didn't write about the brickwork that is not fitting right I would never notice it - I would just say it is as it supposed to be - in real life not everything sits perfectly as it should either ;)
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, guys, you're very reassuring. It's so true, isn't it, that it's the flaws that help make our tiny things look real. I'm sure there's a life lesson in that :)
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