Hey, I'm Studson and welcome back to my first video. I'm gonna take you through
the process of me creating this Nook's Cranny using pretty much cheap materials
like foam board, balsa wood, and some corrugated paper. Typically I like to
jump straight into a model without much of a plan and just sort of see where it
takes me, but in this case I had the game art to reference. Granted it was only
from one side so I had to sort of extrapolate what the other sides would
look like based off the interior of Nook's Cranny. I knew I wanted to build it at
28mm scale, so technically it could fit in a Dungeons & Dragons game.
Knowing that I wanted the door to be one and a half inches tall by one inch wide
all the other sizes were extrapolated from there. Nook's Cranny sort of bows
out a little bit as you go up, sort of like a Dr. Seuss house, so I ended up
slicing off a few slivers from the edge of each side so that once it's
constructed, it's not totally straight up and down. And with the first walls on, now
we have a cute little trapezoid. I used a door template I made to sketch
out where the door would be and then as well as the window. It definitely would
have been easier to do this before the walls were glued together, but whoops.
And then I used a craft blade to cut those out.
Next we're building the little... I don't know what it is... the little addition that's
on the left side of the house. I assume it's Timmy and Tommy's honey
bucket so that's what we're going with. The roof slopes off to the left so we're
slicing off a little bit of an angle here.
I love foam board because it's super easy to work with. If you make a mistake and
forget to slice something off, it's super forgiving and you can just correct it or
just remake it. I specifically get the foam board from
the dollar store or the Dollar Tree or whatever you have near you because the
brand they have actually has a really weak adhesive that keeps the paper on
which makes it super easy to peel off. Normally I would have tried to do the
gables here as part of the initial cuts of the two short walls, but I forgot to
and that's okay because I'm just going to ultimately cover up everything with
balsa wood anyway. For each side of the roof, I'm cutting it at an angle along
the edge so that when the seams come together the ridge is nice and closed.
This will make it a lot easier to lay on the faux metal corrugated sheeting later
so that we don't have any huge gaps that need to be covered up with other material
And there you have it! Our ugly white house is done. Next it was time to
start adding some outer details so I'm starting with some balsa wood which I'm
heavily scratching up with just a sharp object. You could use a pushpin, an icepick
whatever you have and then I spent probably ten minutes scratching this up.
The important thing is you add some large wood grain... hold on one second...
Balsa wood is super smooth so we need to add some wood grain to match that
exaggerated but simplified animal crossing look. After scratching up the
balsa wood with the texture, it got sliced into a bunch of different boards
of varying sizes and then basically just filled in over the entire model using
hot glue. This part of the process took the longest, but it was also the most
rewarding to see nook's cranny actually start to take shape. For the window panes
on the inside of here I used a thinner one millimeter balsa wood and the reason
I did this is because I didn't want the foam to show through when you look
through the windows later on. I'm pretty bad about measuring something precisely
before I cut it I'll usually do this where I'll just sort of put the wood in
place and sort of make a little notch with the craft knife and then slice it
out for this part it was easier just to lay down the entire length of wood and
then clip it off with a pair of clippers and send it flying across the room
because I was getting kind of bored and I thought it'd be fun to search for it
for about ten minutes. There we go, all boarded up, time for some finer details.
Here I'm using some tacky glue for connecting some tiny finer wood details
this is for the panes that are going to go around the door and around the window.
I'm name-dropping tacky glue because I love it, but you can pretty much use any
white PVA glue. There we go some final last door details and next we're going
to move on to the window for windows like these I like to raid
the recycle bin and keep any clear plastic that I could do is rather than
having to be actually buying any sort of window material like the door I
surrounded the perimeter of the window with some thin strips of balsa wood and
PVA glue and then I did the same for the inside as well
tiny little window panes so I'm not actually gluing down the window yet
because I knew I was going to be painting the entire thing with spray
paint and they didn't want to paint over the clear window so I'm just sort of
mapping out where it's gonna go and putting a perimeter of a window pane
there so I'll be able to slide it back in place later I am super excited about
corrugated paper I don't even have to try to make metal sheeting the scale of
the paper pretty much already matches corrugated metal sheeting so after some
slicing and gluing it's already looking like a roof next I placed the little
nubs of what looked like wood beam sticking out from underneath the roof
there aren't actually any supports there so this is just a cosmetic detail for
the door handle I used a tiny piece of plastic from the plastic backing of a
package of socks so make sure you use exactly that or your model will be
garbage. The ridge on the top of the roof has these cute little rivets which I
luckily had some tiny little tack nails laying around for and with that the
basic shape is done and it's ready for a base for the base I also used foam board
just like I did for the rest of the house but I really wouldn't recommend it
because after I started putting a lot of paint and glue on it I realized it
started to warp what you'd really want to use here is something with a little
more structure probably a heavy chipboard or an MDF board, but the foam
was super easy to work with because I could perfectly trim out the size I
needed and then I glued it to my base using hot glue and you might be able to
see that I tapered the edges of the base a little bit that's just to give it more
of a natural look that blends it down to the table
here I'm tracing out the edges of the wall where Nook's Cranny will be in
contact with the base i'm ultimately not going to be gluing down the house to the
base because i want to be able to detach the building if I ever want to use it in
tabletop gaming or maybe put it in a different diorama. Nook's Cranny has a
nice rustic little log fence that goes around it, oh and there's a perfect stick
just waiting outside, wow. I'm gonna use the stick as a scale log to be cut into
all the lengths I need for the fence. Off-camera you can't see but they're
flying all around my room and I think I lost like four or five of them these get
glued around the perimeter of the base and later on I'll take some twine and
wrap it around the top of each one now I hear you while asking when are you going
to start using some liquitex modeling pastes to add some texture to your phone
and make it appear more like a stucco or dirt texture and I'm going to do that
right now. I also go through with a rolled-up paper towel and sort of add a
dappled texture so that when I paint it you don't see any brushstrokes. Here I'm
sealing the whole thing in a mixture of black paint and matte Mod Podge this is
a great way to add a primer and a sealant to your model all in one step.
I actually learned this from another youtuber, Black Magic Craft. I highly
recommend his channel if you're interested in building terrain for D&D
and tabletop games. This is magic. I do this on pretty much any piece of terrain
I build now. The roof still has kind of a green tint to it so I'm spraying the
whole thing in a Tamiya gray fine surface primer to just fill in any nooks
and crannies I might have missed while putting the Mod Podge on in the previous
step. This gives me a nice uniform colored base coat to work with when I
start to add paint. For paint, you don't have to use anything fancy. I'm using the
cheapest acrylics I could find. I think these cost about $1 per bottle, but I
think the beauty of a weathered house is in the imperfections, so you don't need
expensive paint. Garbage paint is great paint. After browning up the floor and
the dirt, I'm now hitting the edge of the wall with some gray.
I'm going to be covering the entire house in several layers of paint
working up from darker to lighter, so we're just gonna hit the entire house
with an earth brown. The nice thing about these acrylics is they dry super fast.
Now we're painting our corrugated roof with blue. This is the blue called cobalt blue.
Nook's Cranny is actually fairly light in wood tone so we're going over
most of the house with a toffee and a khaki brown and then taking that khaki
and dry brushing it over the entire house. You want to try to get almost all
of the paint off your brush before you start painting. The goal here is that
this paint should just be hitting up the finer details at the top so all that
dark paint and other layers you've been putting down can still show through below
Next I'm priming the door handle in a black paint and then I'm using a
metallic Tamiya gunmetal gray. I'm very excited for this next part because it's
the first time I get to try out a static grass applicator. What the heck is that?
You start by laying down a layer of static grass adhesive, which is just a
fancy marketing word for glue and through the power of electricity
generated from a 9-volt battery, each of the blades of grass get electrically
charged as they pass out of the hopper and then they stick straight up in the
glue. It's sort of how the hairs on the back of your neck stick up when you
watch an ARSM crafting video. Make sure you save the blades of grass that were too
weak to adhere to your model they'll do better next time. Using a comb you can
brush up some of the more resistance blades of grass and now you have a full lawn.
Time to dry brush the roof and some lighter shades. we're using a pretty cool
blue. This one's called "Cool Blue." Yeah, that's looking pretty cool. With the
brush, I'm hitting any sort of raised edge highlight as well as anything that
might have gotten worn over time like the ridge on this roof. Now I don't have
a very steady hand when it comes to painting so for the Nook's Cranny sign
I'm gonna use a pro move called tracing. I overlaid this little printout I have
onto my piece of cardboard and then take a sharp object and press kind of hard to
get an indent into the cardstock below. I then use the grooves here to sort of
help guide my paintbrush as I paint over the lines. it's lumpy, but I think it kind
of works for the art direction of the sign. Now it's time for the twine that I
talked about earlier. This twine is very hairy, but using a lighter you can
quickly singe off some of those stray hairs. Be careful though as fire is
sometimes hot. I use super glue to adhere the twine to each post. With a dab, I
would stick the twine and then wrap it around a couple times
before moving on to the next.
I accidentally loosened some hairs while wrapping the twine so I couldn't resist
bringing out the fire again. By the way something I learned is that super glue is
super flammable, so wait for it to dry first. The house is pretty much done at
this point so it's time to do some other finer detailing. Here I'm finishing up
the drop box which I painted using the same colors as the house except for a
nice terracotta orange for the lid. For the label on the top of the drop box,
I found this random piece of junk mail that happened to be blue and white
dipped it in some watered-down Mod Podge and then sealed it to the top of the lid
The printed one would look nicer but the recycle bin is a great place for resources.
For the hot item board I used more balsa wood and cardstock and then
sealed it with Mod Podge and primer. Hey, here's a fun fact:
I had jury duty scheduled for the beginning of March but then it suddenly
got cancelled because of the stay at home order, which is sad for the justice
system, but perfect for this crafting project because a barcode makes a
perfect abstracted little sheet of paper.
Tiny nails as pushpins and then I painted them red.
I wanted a nice clean edge for the model so I just took some acrylic black paint
and went around the entire edge of the base.
And it's done. Let's roll some beauty shots...
And there it is! Thank you so much for watching! My name is Studson
this is Studson studio. if you liked this video, please consider subscribing. I have
more plans in the future to make more videos about terrain and buildings from
other video games and TV shows as well as videos on the custom and kit bashed
Gunpla I'm working on as well. If you want to see more of the pictures
of the things I'm working on, head over to instagram.com/studsonstudio
where you can see some of my past work, but until then, thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you next time.