Thursday 27 June 2019

Getting Started

I've always been fascinated by Tudor buildings and here in the UK we are obviously lucky to be able to visit many edifices built during that particular period in history.  Unfortunately, no matter how much I save up I'm never going to be able to afford one though, so my 'building' this dolls house is probably the likliest way I'm ever going to actually own anything similar.

Having made a start on the external construct I decided to take a break from it while I work out how I want to proceed decoratively.  This has given me the opportunity to work on the external beams which are often a feature of houses built during the tudor period.  Over the centuries, most of the wood has weathered and aged, taking a few knocks here and there, which is something I particularly wanted to capture.  The beams would also have been hand cut, and as such would have lacked the perfect straight edges you often see on modern planed wood. 

In the kit I have, Maple Street Miniatures supply varying thicknesses of balsa wood for the beams, all straight edged and smooth, and it's this which I've been working on over the last few days. 


In the photo above you can see how the beams originally look at the bottom of the picture compared to the beams I've worked on using a carving tool and a craft knife to 'bevel' the edges a little, and a wire scourer and ball stylus to roughen the wood and add little dings and dents to it.  The temptation here is to go a bit mad and add lots of dents etc, but I hopefully restrained myself from going too OTT with them!


Having roughened the wood up I stained the beams using Rustins wood dye in Teak. I did try a couple of other wood dyes to begin with but then found that a couple of coats of the teak stain most resembled the colour I want, which I think has turned out okay.  As the stain dries out it becomes lighter looking which is something to bear in mind when applying it.


As you can see I used a brush to stain the balsa with and learned the hard way (i.e tipping the contents of a tin of wood stain all over my table!) to pour it from the tin into a container within a container.....far better to be safe than sorry!  I also learned that it's just as easy applying the stain with a rag onto balsa, as using a brush, it's really just a matter of personal preference and what you have to hand. The balsa sops up the stain almost instantly either way.  The dropper bottle by the way is Distress Ink, often used in card making, which I thought might work on wood, but I ended up not using it at all.


 And so onto my final photo of the day - the finished result. Cut, scratched, dinged, scoured and stained, looking far more like old beams of wood than when I started. As these are the extermal beams part of me is tempted to paint a little grey colour wash over them to try make them look a little more weathered, but for now I'm just going to leave them alone I think...


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