571 replies to this topic

[Dourin]

Those mushrooms... those mad cap mushrooms...

 

Brilliant work, loving every bit of it.

[Steven]

Thanks guys! As a Mordheim player, my dwarfs know the usefulness of mad cap mushrooms!

[Steven]

Two more shots of the glowing mushrooms, since I’m really digging this:

[Thunderförge]

Do you need to put a flickering LED under the cooking fire? ;-)

[Steven]

Ha! Thankfully I’m out of lights, so my fever for that has broken. If I do that I’ll also install back lights on motion sensors so I don’t need my little flashlight when I want to show off.

[Steven]

The dwarf fort is almost done! I’ve just got a few details in the lake to fix up, and some work on the exterior. I originally did the exterior in 2012 and it’s showing some wear and tear. I want to clean up the chipped paint, add some water, and make some trees.

In fact, I want to make a forest.

I want about 60 trees surrounding the base of the fort, so the mountain rises above the woods is a cool way. The trees would look neat in their own right, and make the fort seem bigger in comparison. That many trees will be hard to make, so I need a method that is fast and cheap, while still giving good results.

I like the wire-wrapped-around-hairs method, which folks usually do by unraveling twine, but that seemed time consuming. So I was thrilled when I found loose fibers for sale cheap:





I got a huge box of these for like $20. I picked up some 16 gage wire and stared making trees:



Getting the fibers to lay flat is the tricky part, they want to tangle up. But I’ve been managing about ten per hour when I have time to work on this, so I’m feeling good about that. I’ve experimented with painting and I like what I’ve seen so far; more on that later. Here’s the forest so far (tiny woodsman for scale):

[Steven]

Here is my latest trees:



Much bushier and with straighter bristles than the first iterations. This one has been trimmed with scissors and spray painted brown.

Here it is with two greens sprayed on, compared to the sad-sack excuses from the first iteration:



Simply being more discerning about which gobs of twine I use makes the trees much better. Here’s the new painted tree posed outside the fort:



Again, I can make about 10 trees per hour, so a forest is easily attainable!

[Steven]

I used crinkled aluminum foil for the trunks, hot glued to the twisted wire. It works real well, even if the paint goes on a little spotty. Here are the first five threes done and planted around the dwarf fort. I have 35 more which need trunks, paint, and finishing touches, but all that is only a few more nights’ work.

[Steven]

There is now a forest:







This is 58 trees, I’m about done with trees now. Time to clean up the exterior, add some more shrubbery, and work on the waterfall

[Skull Krusher]

Beware the Bark Beetle!!!   Very good.  Have enjoyed watching the progression of your hard work...  You have earned shares in my brewery so stop by anytime in the Rusty Harpoon within Kraka Draka.  Cheers and well done as Florin the barkeeper rolls a barrel of the finest for your efforts.

 

[Steven]

Thanks SK! This forest was really fun to make, and it totally transforms the look of the exterior.

[Steven]

Hey gang, long time no dwarf fort. I got a cool app on my phone that takes 3D scans of objects using photogrammetry, so I made some scans of all the dwarf fort levels: https://www.thingive...s&sort=relevant

It’s pretty fun to look at the features you can see, and you can print out a pocket-sized dwarf fort too