The Tiniest Nightmare
‘Lo child!
An inordinate amount of time has passed, utterly void of struggle - no ex-wives were contained within it! And now we're back, the Infernal Machine has coughed and screeched and lurched back into motion. I spent most of my break playing Disco Elysium, about which much, much more anon - I think I will have to write something terribly long and navel-gazey about it, because it did so for me, obviously.
I didn’t spend the entirety of December in a disturbingly accurate simulation of my late twenties as an insufferably philosophical blackout drunk, though. About halfway through the month, my girlfriend came to me and presented a challenge:
“So my work is having a little art contest for Christmas; I’m supposed to make some kind of little diorama or something about a Christmas-themed movie. These other guys… they’re just gonna bring out the construction paper and cottonballs. We can do better than that, right? Even if we only have a week?”
Children, we can absolutely do better than that.
I was gratified to find that we’re able to model, print, construct and paint a fully accurate miniature of Jack’s room from The Nightmare Before Christmas in a total of six days:
Modeling the furniture took Elder Viki Winter about two days, and we were able to fit all of it into one printing session of around six hours. We’re working on getting the STL files for these furnishings all cleaned up and listed somewhere for you to download yourself, if you want to print them at home. I’ll update this with links when we’ve got it sorted.
Painting took me three sessions of about six hours each. The tree is real - the pine tree outside my house sacrificed a finger to the cause. Little presents are wrapped in Washi tape, which worked out better than I had any right to expect. I’ve been using the Apothecary White contrast paint, all heaped up in pools, to make the translucent effect on the windows, and I’m really happy with how that’s working out. Also, can’t understand how people struggle with painting woodgrain on things - I struggle to get things NOT to look like woodgrain. How do you people not just make a woodgrain with brushstrokes every time you paint anything?
The bookshelves took the most time, but mostly because of my own idiosyncrasies - I wanted the colors to be right, dim and dusty but saturated, intense but gloomy color like the movie. I also get a little… perfectionist? About making sure I don’t paint too many of the books the same color, or repeat a pattern, so I was rolling a D20 to determine which color each book should be. So that took a while.
Ultimately, it ended up looking quite a bit like the original props from the movie, which used miniatures for some of these interior sequences:
That comparison is usually my standard for success - I try to match the originals as closely as possible, whether I’m working on a dog, a painting, or a room. Think this time we pretty much nailed it.
