I got a few hours into working on the Donn'Alaich Sian table and thought "Am I nuts?" First of all, making sure that a panel of styrofoam is exactly 48"x48" is way harder than you might think. I actually got myself a fancy shmancy aluminum T square to do it with, and it still took me several hours to get one of the two to approximate size. I can't scrimp on this one though, folks; the tables have to sit very securely side-by-side... so it's gotta be right on the money.
Then, in order to produce the shadowy tile effect you see here, I have to create shallow grooves in the foam in a uniformly grid of 1" lines. With a ball point pen. I have also decided that the tiles will not extend fully to the edge of the foam (as they do in that sample I made up) because lining up those tiles when the two tables are pushed together is going to be murder. What's more, there's definitely a seam down the middle of the 4X4 surface, and the only way to really make that work is to somehow design it into the floorplan. This is my best approximation. Let's not forget that I still have to look forward to painting it all black, drybrushing it with not one, not two, but three different layers of paint and then I get to build sand dunes...
So there I was on my knees with a giant aluminum ruler making one lonnnng line after the other in the surface of pink styrofoam that I've been nursing with care for days on end now while I watched four episodes of the Gilmore Girls back to back on my laptop, and I got to the point where I thought "Is this what a grown man does?"
Also, tonight I pissed some people off on Warseer, and for some completely inexplicable reason I actually feel kind of guilty and embarrassed. I have no idea why that is, because it's not like I was raised Catholic or anything. Weird.
2 comments:
If you're using a big drywall square -- looks like one to me, and I have one I use for foam cutting, too -- then it makes a good cutting guide. Keep the knife blade flush with the edge of the drywall square and you should be fine. And watching "Gilmore Girls" won't help the cutting, either. It might be fun to watch, but, unless they have an episode on building gameboards you're probably better off watching "The Red Green Show". I've also found that having several cats in the house can provide some interesting textures on pink or blue foam...the little shits just love to scratch the stuff with their claws. ;)
If spending hours on end on pointless hobby stuff that I probably won't get complete use of is a waste of time I'm in the wrong business.
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