I've been flailing a bit lately. Which feels pretty normal for the times. It's probably a good sign that I've only been flailing creatively & that work-wise (& overall life-wise, I've managed to keep on keeping on).
Although I really want to work in 1:12 scale, I'm feeling intimidated by the lack of materials & expertise that I have. I have plans for making dioramas or room boxes, but I know it's going to take a lot of time (which I have) and a fair bit of money (which is not in great supply right now). So I'm returning to working on the Rose Garden Tea House. It's a fully decorated kit & although the tininess of the 1:24 scale is intimidating, it offers the most opportunity for honing my miniature-making skills.
To that end, I've finished one of the cabinets of the tea house, after taking some photos of tea leaves to create my own set of drawers in the bottom of the cabinet.
The original drawers were nice enough, but mostly East Asia-centric. As the tea world is a lot bigger, I wanted the drawers that reflected more of the wide, wonderful world of tea. Though I'm no longer a consumer of caffeine, I do still dearly love tea & have quite the decaf collection of teas. It came in quite handy for the making of these drawers.
Once the tea drawers were completed, I build the cabinet using a magnetic jig to help keep the pieces nice & square. Some of the cabinet pieces were slightly warped, so it's not perfect, but the jig definitely helped make the cabinet as straight as possible.
Once it was finished & nicely set, I posed it in its final place, & put a few of the resin ornaments that I've been casting into it, just for funsies.
I don't know that any of these pieces will be in the final set, as I'm not yet sure what kind of colorway I want for this house. Looking at these pieces, I think that I'm going to want my faux glassware to be milky & opaque; less brilliantly colored, more muted.
Speaking of things that I want, my time with Illustrator has given me some amount of skill with flooring. Not wood flooring; I have new & exciting ideas that I'm plodding towards with the speed of a snail. But other forms of flooring - & wallpaper! I have made some solid-enough progress to start an Etsy shop beginning with some classic flooring & wallpaper designs. It's from this start that I'm going to pull some of my 1:12 designs & see if they can be adapted for 1:24 scale while maintaining the level of detail I'd like.
But that's a project for another day! For today, I'm delighted to have finished a piece of this tea house & come one step closer to creating a little creative vision of my own.