Workshop Diary: This is Probably a Bad Idea

I've been flirting with what should probably be a bad idea. But I have given myself time to think about & reasoned through it. I've even taken the time to make a list of the benefits of doing it. 

I'm thinking about redoing the box for my current roombox project. It would be a lot of work, but it would give me the opportunity to try out some new things I would otherwise have to wait quite some time to test out. It would also give me a chance to do a little bit of a better job on some of the things that were my first try on this project. I've been pretty happy with it so far, not minding the imperfections, but I want to learn. And sometimes that means doing. 

As I said I listed out some of the benefits, so here they are. 

    ♦ Cleaner edges on my box. ♦

I've done some studying of cardboard construction and different ways I could make the edges clean and nice looking. Which is something I've been exploring through each of the boxes I work on. But now of course I want to put some of those ideas that I've learned into practice. I want to see how they hold up. 

    ♦ Another attempt at an inset window. ♦

One of the things I really wanted to explore with this box was setting the window into the walls for a cleaner look. I ran into some issues when I was doing this and it would be nice to try it again, especially with some of the above techniques that I've learned. 

    ♦ Possibly adding a fireplace or a metal fireplace / wood oven that is not set into the wall but has a pipe that comes down from the ceiling. ♦

This one I was really excited about, but as I thought through it and looked at sizes, as well as the size of the room, having a fireplace of some kind in a room that small with a tree taking up a good portion of the room would be a horrendous fire hazard. Obviously not for the miniature itself because there's not going to be any fire in there, but I think it would damage the realism of the room. So I decided to nix that one. 

Photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash

    ♦ Cleaner floor & walls. ♦

It’s just very messy.

    ♦ Testing my data on paint coverage. ♦

This one really reveals that I'm a math nerd. Sometime ago I spent the better part of an afternoon researching and calculating how much paint it would take to cover the walls of a roombox. And then additionally how many, to scale, paint buckets it would take to hold that paint. Which of course meant I had to calculate how big a 1/12 scale paint bucket would be and how much paint it would hold. It was quite a fun afternoon. But I genuinely don't know if anyone else would be interested in that kind of information.

One of the things that I'm finding I want in these larger projects is more planning. I start out with some semblance of an idea and then the idea becomes more honed in as I go. Usually ending up slightly in a different direction than the original plan was. 

This isn't a bad thing. I've done NaNoWriMo and I'm very much comfortable with the seat of your pants exploration writing. It can be very helpful in your early drafts. But when you're writing you can do multiple drafts and it's okay to just toss out thousands of words. 

I feel like I'd like to go into these larger miniature projects with maybe not a complete idea of everything I want to do, but with a very solid idea of the tone and direction.