“Stirring the Sh*t” (Season of Scenery)

Well here we are over half way through the first month of “Dave Stone’s Season of Scenery” and so far I haven’t posted any finished scenic items! But that all changes today, I have now at least finished my “pipes on pallets”, made from coffee stirrers and “doggy poop bags” (hence the title, I don’t just throw these ideas together you know!!). Now when you last saw these they looked like this  👉), the pallets were assembled and the pipes had been glued together in a pyramid shape, sprayed black and dry-brushed in chainmail, so I’ll pick up the story from there…

I decided that it was going to be easier to paint the pallets and pipes separately as much as I could, so firstly I needed to paint the pallets to look like wood (even thought they were actually made of wood, this is a stupid hobby sometimes!!!  🙄). Yes, but I wanted a more aged looking wood than the pristine “virginal” look they currently had, so after spraying them black I used the same recipe I’d used on the shed I made (for this challenge) two years ago. So taking some scenic brown, and mixing it with some mid grey the result was liberally dry-brushed over the pallets, next another mix was made up, this time I took, Eurasian flesh, coffee, chocolate brown and more mid grey and once the colour looked about right this was dry-brushed over the last mix, more Eurasian flesh was dry-brushed over this and finally a light dry-brush of coffee went over the top of that.

Looking at the pipes again I though they looked too shiny, so I dry-brushed (there was a lot of dry-brushing going on with these! 😁) some dark grey over them, this toned them down a lot and looked more natural to my eye at least. Next I added my now almost trademark rust effect over the ends of the pipes (yep if you want to see stuff that looks like crap, this is the place to come (()), so starting with chestnut (I must buy some rust coloured paint!) this was roughly blobbed around the ends, and a little was very lightly brushed along the lengths too, this was then repeated with orange, being careful(ish) to stay within the chestnut areas, finally I added a few dots of chainmail so show fresh “chipping”.

Once all this was dry, I glued the pipes into place atop the pallets with some PVA wood glue. Now health and safety would never allow them to be left like this (they were basically an accident waiting to happen), so I thought I’d better add some strapping around them, I couldn’t do this while the pipes were separate as the straps would need to run through the pallets. So taking some thick adhesive tape I cut four long thin strips (about 2mm wide) and carefully wrapped these around the pipes and pallets securing the ends with a little superglue, I left the ends sticking out, as straps would, and covered these ends in more superglue to stiffen them and cover the sticky undersides of the tape. Once dry, I mixed up a little “greenstuff” and added small squares just below the tape ends to represent the clips used to secure them. Next day once all this was hard the straps were painted royal blue, and I added some highlights here with some ocean blue, and the “clips” were painted black and highlighted with some chainmail. I then gave them both a coat of “Quickshade” (strong tone), I found the best way to do this without it sticking them down to anything was to push an old paintbrush through the top pipe on both and suspend them across the sides of a small box while they dried. Finally I gave them a spray coat of matt varnish. I’ve stuck my “Alien henchman” in the pictures to give a sense of scale. Simple stuff but at least I’ve got something finished for this challenge now!

Till next time stay safe, and enjoy the scenery

Cheers Roger.