Re: The Blue Box
The Steampunk festival is too short a notice, but it would definitely be considered for next year, what do you say Brian?
Regarding the paint job, no one is more critical than I am, however when someone like Terrasolo says what he just did, you can take that to the bank and is a compliment second only to the real BBC workshop.
I'm glad I put in all the hours and dozens of samples to find the look I was going for and harness my technique.
Having practiced it so much on small samples of wood, it was terrifyingly exciting to finally apply it to the full size pieces.
One thing about this paint scheme is that, depending on your lighting conditions and camera settings, this will photograph much like the real box, either appearing darker or lighter in color.
Adopting the modern saying "Once you go black, you never go back" (LOL), I knew it was important to not go too far with the toning glaze I mixed.
Had it been applied too much, there would literally be no going back - without repainting the base coat, which wouldn't work for what we achieved with laying down the basecoat in a thinned-out stain-like coating.
Painting it over would virtually make all that wonderfull wood grain disappear and also make it a darker blue.
This I thankfully discovered while conducting my thorough paint tests.
I made sure to take pics with my phone during the carefully applied glazing operation to monitor how it all looked photographed. I had to find that "sweet spot" where it looked right in person AND on camera.
You will notice in my recently posted images, all three walls are leaning side by side; this was not razzle dazzle for the camera, this was a visual technique to ensure the overall color toning was in the same family. I didn't want one wall looking much darker than the other, so after the initial toning glaze was wiped on, the wall was stood up and I began slowly building up the aging and weathering in layers, constantly standing back to look at it all at once and continually taking photos to ensure it looked right on camera.
This process took several hours of work, which may seem like overkill to those handicapped in the arts, but was so crucial for my particular technique.
Thankfully, The Blue Box 2 will be a full fledged Smith box, so the painting process will be straightforward and possibly take less time as we may use custom dyed furniture lacquers to stain it.
