Also, no set, nor ring lights, mics, or a script. So I won’t be knocking on Hollywood’s door any time soon with my own miniature terrain building show. Though the YouTube market place is flooded with them already. Great ones, good ones, and everything else in between. Epic builds, dioramas, water effects, painting gurus, everything under the sun oh my! Rock moulds, static grass applicators, tufts, and pre-made flowers, rocks, sand, screed and multi coloured grouts. So many options for paints, and finishing styles. You can go ultra realistic, campy, grim-dark. Washes, glazes, over sprays and dry brushing. So much content on all of it. I like watching people make 4 x 8ft boards that have various zones of scenery types. Mountain range, valley, river bed, open water, temple ruins, an open field, stands of trees, bridges… the list can be endless. I’d make it all, if I could. I build mine on 2 x 2ft plywood squares. It was meant to help me store them, but I keep them all together in the basement. I have plans for four more boards to complete my designs. But where can I possible put eight feet of terrain in my house? I can’t do it. Going to have to wait until the kids get older and we sell off, donate a whole whack of childrens gear. Clothes, toys, change tables, tool benches, and tote boxes worth of accessories. Going to be a while. Also, I want to build my own over sized gaming table for the basement, so having that would help out too. I’ll make mine with a deep inset pocket so that I can put toppers on to cover our games/puzzles that are on the go. Very much Wyrmwood inspired that way. Stay classy San Diego.
Tag: furniture
Changing interests.
I have spent a great deal of time, over the last three years watching people build & make things on YouTube. Everything from home remodels, to hand made furniture, slab tables and machining. I would like to think that attempting much of this would be fun. Not that I’d be any good at it, but rather to experience it first hand, noise, smells and all. I never cared much for machining as a kid, though my father did it as a tool & die maker, thus a skilled tradesman, before moving into consulting and being a bridge between the shop floor, and the white coat techies and their sales staff. Now I wish I had access to some machining tools of my own, and an ear to bend to help figure things out. I would have had a riot of a time getting some furniture building tips from either of my grandfathers. Both of whom passed away before I even thought about doing it myself. They made chairs and tables in England, before and after the second world war, of which only one grand father had to take part. I myself had a brief stint in wood shop at school for several semesters, built some sets for a university play I was in, and then worked in a cabinet makers shop for a few months making antiques repairs, and milling up baseboards and trim for twelve hours a day, and cleaning up saw dust endlessly. So the wood shop wasn’t totally foreign to me, but I didn’t know I was going to fall for it this hard.
Now that there is no way to get it, I’d really appreciate their hard won expertise (my grandfather’s more so than the German cabinet maker). They could have sat, tea in hand, and pointed and watched as I worked on projects, chiding me for silly mistakes, or making corrections to my order of operations. Those are things I could really go for now. But alas, the furniture makers are more than a decade dead now. No video or hand books left behind of things they’d learned or wanted to pass along. I do have a hand made T square from my Grandpa Holyome. A dense hardwood straight edge he fashioned. Which I use fairly often. I’m not Mr Precise, so it works wonders on eye balled projects. I have properly machined tools too, but those I bought, they weren’t built by my family decades ago. A life time ago now.
When I get to thinking about all of that lost experience and knowledge I feel a little sad. What do they say now, like tears in the rain, or a breath on the wind. Gone.
I’m sure there were some small but strategically important hints or tweaks to techniques that would have gone a long way to improving my skills which they might have shared with me. Not only that, but to have made better memories with them. In all honesty, if they weren’t dead, they’d still be in England, on a six hour time difference. Not living next door or just up the road from me. And they’d both be in their mid nineties by now, anywhere from 94-98 years of age. But the fantasy was, nimble of mind, comfortably close at hand, teaching as we went. Cup of tea to keep them comfortable. Oh well. C’est le vie.
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