Things Got a Little Outa Control

 

It all started innocently enough with this little wooden

3D puzzle that's been sitting around for a while in my reserve stack (you know, that pile of untouched project stuff you have on standby because, just like running out of books, it would be a disaster to suddenly find you have no project to work on one day).

There's an amazing amount of design and engineering that goes into these lazer-cut puzzles, but they are actually relatively simple things to assemble. This one took

maybe four easy hours spread over a couple of days

to slot all the various components together.

But here's where things went sideways.

I could have, at this point, just simply arranged the pieces in our display case, maybe on top of a nice bit of felt, but somehow I just couldn't leave it at that. (So many things wrong with how my brain works!)

First, I decided to permanently attach the various bits to a base, and since I have loads of foam-board propped up against the wall, leftovers from building out the cargo trailer, that would make the perfect, lightweight, stable base!

But since the hanging-file boxes I use for storing displays when not actually on display have a smaller footprint than the display case (is that too many 'displays' in one sentence?)

I had to strategically split the base so the bits would fit into a single storage box.

Then, that pink foam just wasn't doing it for me, which called for slapping a little paint down.

At first I thought "Wow! That 'water' is pretty intense!" But after a little thought, I decided the intense water would make the unpainted wood puzzle pop. (I don't know if that was true artistry in action or if I was just saving myself the hassle of repainting.)

And, while I'm doing that, how 'bout adding a bit of land over there in the corner for the watertower/lighthouse to live on?

And land isn't flat so that called for a little carving. 

Hint, the solvents in rattle-cans will eat foam, but if you lay down very light coats of earthy tones the eating is limited, which is a quick way of toning down the pink and getting a decent, somewhat textured, base-layer for ground cover (Don't do this for water areas which you want to be nice and flat, not randomely textured!).

And if you're really adventurous, you can lay down a few heavier, solvent rich  patches in a controlled and deliberate manner, (I have plenty of foam if I screw it up and need to start over, so why not?) to do some quick, more pronounced, terraforming.

I used tools to carve the deep cut across the center, but rattle-cans for shaping the shallow gullies.

With the base-layer down I added some vegetation from my stash of ground cover. Again, a pretty garish color, but in keeping with the intense water.

Shifting gears, I had a handfull of these little streetlamps I could spot along the dock sections.

That lead to wiring up said dock sections with some under-dock lighting, and for a little pop, the interior of the two buildings got stuffed with some lights as well. Colored this time. And because it made sense, a few more lights for the watertower/lighthouse.

All this required cutting some channels into the bottom-side of the two base sections for wires.

Then it was time

to start gluing things down

and sorting out the wiring.

Foam is, of course, a good insulator, so when using hot-glue to tack wires into the channels, even the low-temp version, it takes a long time for the glue to cool and solidify.

But, apparently that still wasn't enough for me.

When there's leftover room on the sheets all the parts are lazered into the maker of these kits tends to fill that leftover space up with duplicates of some of the more fragile pieces.

Instead of just throwing these duplicates away

I threw on some random pops of color

and built

a few piles of debris, because when have you ever seen a debris-free harbor?

One thing many artists struggle with is stopping when a peice is done. The tendancy is to keep poking at it untill things get over-worked and muddy. The same held true here. When enough was enough I had to force myself to stop adding trash, even though I hadn’t used up all the leftovers yet.

But, aparently I still wasn't quite done.

I took a bit of leftover dock,

broke up one of the 4 boxes you're supposed to set around on the docks, and sanded all the bits so they would sit flat on the "water" and look like they were floating.

A few strategic touches of white paint helped with the illusion 

and set the docks and shore-line firmly in the water.

Now, it was time to populate the village!

No, not like that. I'm well past the age, not to mention a few snips, of procreating (My one and only forty-something attempt at this was galavanting around Madrid and Barcelona a couple of days ago.).

I'm talking about the simpler, and far less expensive, plastic minitures version of populating.

But now I had a Goldilocks situation.

The three populations I had on hand were, left to right, way too big, a little too big, and way too small.

Even the new option I bought, far right, was a little too small.

But options are limited in the world of minitures. The 1:87 ratio, second from the left, about a third too big, the 1:160 ratio, third from the left, way too small, so 1:93-95 would probably be just about right. But the closest I could find was 1:100, on the right.

Unlike Goldilocks, this wasn't just right, but but I had to settle for a little too small.

These sets, especially the small ones, often come with, let's call it questionable, paint jobs.

But what do you expect? This set cost me less than a penny per figure. For production efficiency "painting" consists of a couple quick dips into whatever leftover colors have been returned to the paint store as 'yuck!', and a quick swipe of brushed black for hair.

So first step to populating was a little closeup 

brushwork to add a few more likable colors.

Again, the trick for an artist is to know when to stop, so I limited myself here. I can always add more people later if I can't stand it, but this is a remote village not an overcrowded metropolis.

Did anyone notice the one-legged man in the tub? Second from the right, orange top, dark pant-leg.

He must have gotten bashed around at some point because not only was a leg missing but his head was cockeyed too,

but I can work with that. After all, every self-respecting seaport needs a peg-leg!

In this case, the tapered tip of a toothpick.

BTW, don't use cyanoacrylate accelerator around those plastic clips! This one, bottom right, intantly exploded into bits and the operation had to be aborted while I fetched an all steel clip instead.

The trick to placing people

is natural groupings

that present the oportunity for the viewer's mind to create a narative, not just haphazardly spread 'randomness'.

Alright!

Home stretch.

Everything fits in the storage box as designed

All the bits

are in place,

And all the lights

are working.

Only thing left to do is dismantle what's currently in the display case, pack it away into a storage box,

and install the Viking Village in its place.

Granted, it looks nice, but really?

Four hours to assemble the original puzzle, but several weeks of a few hours here and there to put the rest of it together, for a silly little nick-nack?

What the hell happened to my life? Where's all the heroic deeds? The monumental accomplishments?  The notoriety? The public accolades? - - - Oh yeah, I don't really like any of that shit - - -

A Quick Tour of Our Mini-Scape

Recently a little more information was requested about our small "garden" outside the back door.

Well, there's really not that much to it so this shouldn't take long.

In fact, calling it a garden might be stretching the definition a little.

I suppose, with a little imagination, you could clasify it as an English Garden. Largely natural and arguably unkempt compared to the Edwardian and  Victorian garden stylings that underly most of American ornamental gardens and lawns. But we aren't of the 'dam Mother nature and natural processes, I can do it better' mindset.

In fact we never really planned this 'garden' at all. It just sort of happened.

It started with a couple of bird-feeders on fence-post and rebar stands made from salvaged materials because the birds were already kinda nosing around back there so why not give them a reason to hang around.

Then we had one hell of a drought in 2011 so we added the concrete-mixing tub, again, salvaged from stuff we already had, watering hole.

And you can't leave water just sit there without it turning into a mosquito nursery, hense the pump to keep the water moving. And the rocks were added so the birds would have safe places to stand on, and to help the various frogs and toads dropping by to get back out again.

The two small "benches" (there used to be three but one rotted completely away) are actually stands I threw together for displaying some of my found-wood carvings in a gallery.

Turns out that whole gallery scene just isn't me, so naturally they eventually ended up here.

In keeping with the 'build it piece by piece over time with no particular plan' theme, the water tower thingy there came from the greenhouse.

The original idea was that a 7 gallon bucket of water, sitting in the rounded top portion, would gavity-feed a drip-system through a timer/valve. Turns out even the low-presure/gravity-feed valves designed for gravity-systems like this aren't reliable. So that was a failed experiment.

Even though we built it with salvaged fence boards and a few scraps of dimentional lumber (we still have a waist-high stack of fence boards down in the tractor barn), giving up on it completely just seemed wrong, so it ended up here.

Now, instead of a bucket, the upper part houses the outdoor end of an indoor/outdoor thermometer and a gazillion spiders.

One day we stumbled across this Victorian dress-form contraption and thought maybe it would add a little class to an otherwise classless space.

I recently spruced her up with the leftovers of a few rattle-cans.

Don't remember where we picked up the blue-glass and steel finial. I used the bird as a model for a few carvings and one day drug it out of the back of a dusty shelf and put it out here because - well, why not?

The amber lady with vertical holes for cut-flower-stems around the base has history because I'm officially clasified as an antique and can remember her sitting in a bespoke arched niche (my teenage dad and his father custom-built the house) just inside the front door of my grandmother's house (Pumpa died early so it was always grandma's house) from the earliest memories I can drag up.

It moved with her to a smaller, more manageable, house, then to San Miguel de Alende Mexico, and came back to Michigan when she could no longer care for herself.

Because I mentioned it in her eulogy, I ended up with it (the matching basin it sat in had long since disapeared) and here she is.

Neither one of us has any idea where the glass frog came from,  probably a resale-shop find, but where else would you keep a frog?

Same for the lizard. (OK, so I have a thing for lizards) Which we just recently recovered, half buried in the dirt near The Wife’s barn, tarted up with more of those leftover rattle-cans (it was originally all a faded green), and perched next to the watering hole on a couple of orphaned clay-pot bases that have nowhere else to be.

The cactus has been around since the early days of the main barn.

When I wired up the barn I had some heavy copper grounding wire left over, and you never waste copper! So I shaped it into a cactus and wrapped some more copper, smaller 12 gauge this time, around it to flesh it out a little.

Because the weathered copper was blending into the background I recently brightened it up. (Good Lord! Will these cans ever run empty!)

 

OK, so this did actually take longer than I thought, but other than the Lemon Ball Sedum the racoons and I have been battling over, that's it.

Coincidence? This fawn was born in front of us down at the base of the meadow on the first of June, about the same time my cousin, after decades of living with it, finally succumbed to the complications of MS.

Usually, after that initial 'newborn look', mom tucks the fawn out of sight for a couple of months and leaves us wondering. But this morning, the day of my cousin's memorial, mom trots her week and a half old fawn out for us.

It was pretty special.