Making: Shelters

So far I’ve shot almost everything for Maskwitches with a zoomable 18-55mm lens. It’s pretty much the default lens that comes with most cameras. Over the Christmas period I’d picked up a 40mm lens, which is a fairly extreme piece of kit - it has no zoom, and a very narrow depth of field, with the ability to get really close to models. Ideal for Maskwitches, but I haven’t got around to using it.

Today I took the 40mm plunge. Look at it:

It takes a bit of guts to go that short, and there’s always the fear a new piece of unfamiliar kit will cause time to be wasted.

I have just finished making a model hut/shelter for Maskwitches, in no small part inspired by the Howick House, the site of which I visited last year. There’s next to nothing there, funnily enough - it’s the site of 10,000 year-old wooden dwelling. Even the reconstructed house on the site is long gone, swallowed up by the banks of nettles.

Anyway. Let’s jump back. We have need of some illustrations of shelters the people of The Land use sporadically as they move around their Landsongs. No one really lives in any permanent dwelling in Forgotten Doggerland, but there are shelters and places that are used seasonally.

Here’s where it began. Some sticks harvested from the forest set, glued onto a simple cardboard ring. I’ve learned to plan ahead, and I’m ready to put lights inside the model from the beginning.

The frame is complete! Some time ago I’d poured some latex and mixed in some paint, so I have a bunch of ersatz animal skins on hand. But would it be enough? The model was a bit larger than I’d originally intended.

As seems to be the pattern, I got very engaged in the making, and we skip ahead at this point. I had to pour some more “hides” and dry them fast on the radiator. This gave me the opportunity to make some of a different colour, which is cool. Happy accidents.
I also deployed some railway model reeds, and split some hemp rope down into fibres.

I then added some paint to trick the eye that the model is larger than it might appear without some “breakdown” and some heightened “shading”. And then it’s into a landscape set, fire up the smoke machine, put the lights inside and go for it!

There is still some work to do processing these raw shots, but I am very happy:

I’ve taken further shots of the model in the round, so that I can photoshop multiples together, so I’ll share some of those when they’re done. And I haven’t forgotten that I owe you some finished shots from the woodland shoot!

While things can sometimes be tough in the big world, the little world continues to offer a happy place to inhabit. Speak to you soon.