Tiny Furniture (Book Shelves)

Basically, I needed some furniture to occupy an office set I was building for an upcoming animation. In the past I haven't spent a lot of time on the furniture (and you can tell) so this time I decided to step it up a bit. I started with some 1/4" plywood and cut out the various pieces I needed.

I wanted to make these shelves "Fancy" so I added a bevel to the front edge of the top and bottom pieces.

I used my my homemade Dremel router table to make the bevel.

Router tables for the Dremel are fairly easy to make and it do a very good job. Here's a shot of the underside.

The bevel is a little grainy but with a little sanding...

I started assembling the pieces one by one.

I added a little wood glue on the edge. When working on something this small, It really helps to blot the glue with a rag before putting the pieces together. This helps to rid the piece of excess glue.

I used 1/4" braid nails to secure the pieces together. The nails a so small that I needed to start them with a pair of needle nose pliers.

I picked up this tiny hammer in the wood craft section at Menards. It works really well on the braid nails.

Using a punch, I inset the nails so they won't be visible.

I filled the tiny holes with wood putty and sanded the whole piece.

To continue with the "Fancy" theme I stained the wood with a dark reddish stain. I got quite a bit on my workbench so I decided to stain that too. Well, maybe decided isn't the right word.

I wanted the final piece to look like it had been used so I only added two coats of polyurethane. This should make it look shinier in some spots than others.

Finally, I drilled a hole in the bottom of the piece to secure it to the floor.

After a little "roughing up" the finished shelf is ready for action.

Oslo Opera House Model

I got call from ArtOrg the other day and they needed an animation for a video project they were working on. They wanted to use Legos to display a quilt on the Oslo Opera House. So... I needed to make a model of the Oslo Opera House for the short.

As you can see the building is very angular. I decided to use rigid foam insulation because of the many flat surfaces and sharp corners. The insulation is easy to cut and surprisingly strong.

I started by cutting out the basic shapes using a diagram of the roof and used duct tape to secure the pieces together. 

It all came together much easier than I could have imagined. Once the pieces were cut out I was able to prop them up and "magic whooshing sound" Opera House.

The one drawback to using rigid insulation is that you cannot use spray paint to paint it. The chemical propellent will melt the surface of the insulation. But... if you do it right you can get some cool stone like effects. I started by priming the model with regular water based house paint primer. I used a 2" wide brush the paint on the primer and left plenty of pink steaks on the model. I then add a coat of white spray paint.

The spray paint melted the insulation that shown through the primer. I then used some granite textured spray paint to give the unmelted surfaces a little more texture.

And then, I got a little carried away with the spray paint and melted more of the model than I wanted. So I used some spackle to fill in the larger holes that I had melted with the paint. The upside to this was that the spackle smoothed out some of the seams created by the duct tape.

I used latex house paint for the final layer. This will help keep the spackle from flaking off and it doesn't look too bad either.

For the windows I just used plexiglass. It's easy to cut and very few people can actually tell the difference. The supports were made from left over bits of rigid insulation.

Here is the finished model with Legos. We used Micro Figs so the scale would be more accurate.

I used flour to simulate snow which looked great, but turned out to be very difficult to work with when animating. It tends to stick to everything it touches, including my camera.

Here's a link to the finished animation.

Childrens Gift to Norway