Craft

Whilst Mellowdene has a decent sized population for a village, for some time there were no physical houses for the inhabitants and belongings were sparse. In order to show "Life in Mellowdene" some of the virtual surroundings are constructed. To show some of these crafted items we will temporarily step outside of Mellowdene and into the greater world.

 

Wallpapers

Designed on a computer  using the Xara Designer graphics package, the wallpapers usually start with a pattern or animal feature. These are then shrunk down in size and tiled to fill a page. Printed on white or tinted paper, these form the basis for the walls in the interior shots.


Sometimes a wall feature will be printed on top. Examples are wood panelling, doors and windows. If the window needs to admit light, then card will need to be glued to the paper in order that the window frames will have strength. Some light transparent plastic (such as from a CD wallet) can substitute for glass.









The same technique can be used to simulate other wall types - such as in a log cabin.






With experience, cereal packets, glue, printed wallpaper and craft knife,  later sets became more stable. Adjacent walls were permanently attached so they were not continually falling over in photo shoots! Hopefully there is a visible improvement over time!

Over the ensuing months, I constructed more stable sets for Jackson Butterglove's living room and kitchen, Merlin Butterglove's living room, Darcy Fielding's living room, Newton Butterglove's hallway, Horatio Seadog's dining kitchen, the village hall, the postal sorting office.

Chris Snow-Warren's living room and Jackson Butterglove's dining room used the St John's schoolroom with temporary wallpaper and floor coverings. The chapel crypt used a toy shop shell. The Cake Club meeting room was the Pippin's Café shell from the Applewood Department Store with only some red felt placed as carpet and some red furniture to give the necessary impression.

Photo Editing

When it comes to outdoor scenes (and parts of some indoor scenes, e.g, views through windows), the photographs I take often need editing on my computer. I use a program called Xara Designer which combines vector (line/shape) drawing with PhotoShop type techniques. The amount of work depends on the scene.

In this example, I wanted to set a scene at the side of Mellowdene canal. This is the starting point.

The water was created by blue plastic bags overlaid with bubble-wrap. Green fabric draped over some boxes created one canal bank, and a computerised grass texture will be applied to this. The far bank is dark tissue paper that packed some shoes. They might form the basis of rocks. Other areas will need to be covered with stone, foliage, skies... whatever looks right. Also, because this particular scene is set in the past, the canal boat should ideally look different to the one used in contemporary stories - it is a physically different craft. The Field Trip story shows how this worked out.

Here is a before and after example. I wanted to show Mellowdene Docks for the first time, and the first picture in the SeaBreeze story was to be a picture of the Marita May in dock with the Seadog brothers working alongside the motley crew. I placed boxes to determine the perspective and place the figures.

 

 

Furniture 1 - Egg Box Sofa

I used the lid of an egg box to create a shaped settee. This required a single cut through the centre of the lid, but not through the label on top of the lid. I used a craft knife. The label acted as a hinge to fold the lid back on itself.

 The lesser "shapely" half acted as the base of the settee, and I reduced the height of this so that the sitting area was closer to the floor. And that was it! The settee structure was complete. It simply needed covering.



 

I used the egg box itself to help trace a rough pattern onto some thin paper. By holding it in place around the box I could see how this needed to be adjusted, and then cut out another pattern based upon what I learned.

When satisfied, I traced the pattern onto some suitable non-fraying material and cut this out. It was then a question of hand-sewing the pieces together, testing it periodically as I proceeded. Eventually, turning the material inside out and slipping it onto the egg box frame the job was arguably complete.

The seat is slightly concave, which holds the Sylvanian figures nicely. I chose to create a matching seat cushion, thinly stuffed with bubble wrap, but that is an optional extra.

Equipment 1 - Slide Projector with Cartridge

I wanted a slide projector for a particular story. I found an image of one from an Internet search and copied the lens side into my art package as a starting point. I then extended this to create a plain top, sides, bottom, with a recess to accommodate a long box that would represent a slide cartridge. In this way I developed templates - complete with flaps for gluing. Printed on craft card, I cut out the templates with a craft knife and lightly scored the edges I would need to fold. Glued and held together, I was reasonably happy with the result. When creating the box for the slide cartridge I ensured that I had first illustrated the template to give the impression of a few slides in the cartridge. Being a separate piece, the cartridge can be moved within the projector for different photos.