I made a thing!

I wanted a break from painting today so I made a little piece of scenery for my orks. A scalpel, some lolly sticks and pva glue were all I used to make it. Cutting up lolly sticks with a scalpel is... interesting and no good for precise work, but for something an ork made it's perfect. I don't have my tiny hacksaw with me so I'll be making all ork stuff this week!

Lucky Butt Stitches Munition Boks!

It was pretty simple to make, but involved a degree of trial and error to start with. And loads of making shit up all the way through and constant fixing things. Making things for orks is actually a fun way to get into this for me - because I can end up with anything at the end and no matter how messy it is it will still look orky.

I'm going to try and make better crates/boxes/outhouses when I have my little saw and metal square. Here's how I made this one, in the meantime.

I started out by marking the sticks into sections. The box is roughly 3.5cm wide by who knows what! I cut them into sections using my scalpel on a cutting matt. If you use steady, careful strokes at an angle you could use the scalpel to create very neat pieces, but it's much easier to do with a saw and I was making this for orks so I started off each section with a few neat strokes to guide and then just hacked it apart.

Then I glued three of the pieces lengthways side by side, with a tiny gap between each, together using a matchstick type stick. I used PVA glue. When I had 2 I glued them together as close to a right angle as I could.

PVA glue is good for this kindof thing if you have a little patience or think ahead. It's ridiculously cheap and when it does set it sets nice and hard. It can take a little while to get to the point where it can hold itself in place though, so I spent a lot of time trying to prop this all up and hold it together without squishing things about.

I found putting a stick on the inside would help alot if I could bear to hold it in place for a bit. Additionally I started squirting glue everywhere I could on the inside.

I added the other side in the same way (badly)

From left to right here I have; added the 'front', then stuck sticks to it on the outside to act as support, then made the top panel with a broken strut going across. When all the PVA is fully cured this thing became as stable as a rock. I could put quite a bit of weight on it before it felt like it would move at all.

I primed it with my Citadel White Primer - because I need to use it up and I'm saving my Halfords primer for my models! It feels really runny and gives bad coverage compared to the halfords... oh well, it did a good enough job for my ork box.

Basecoat was khemri brown 1:2 paint to water. Only needed one coat - it was at this stage it started to look properly cratey. Until now I was feeling a bit wound up having spent so long trying to work something so simple out and holding bits together, breaking things, regluing etc and thinking it just looked... a bit crap, really.

Devlan mud wash went on, then when that was dry I drybrushed scorched brown on selectively to pick out details. I went heavy near supports and ends of planks and very light in the middle. I topped this up with a light application of badab black wash in the same way, but not going as far out.

Now orks really don't like having this stuff stolen - I thought I'd help them out by painting on some suitably orky faces so no one could possibly get confused about who it belonged too. Regal blue base with enchanted blue on top. 2:1 paint to water.

Very happy with how it turned out. I'm exhausted now so nighty night!