Once Upon a Time: Castle Pop-Up Book Terrain

[ableman33]

Quote:Red Orc said:
 

You already know that this is utterly astonishing, don't you? It really is beyond words to describe how groovy it is.

 doesn't go far enough, it should be standing up surrounded by thousands of other emoticons all whistling and cheering. Excellent excellent work.


LATER:
Looking at it again (and again), seriously, if I were you I'd think about trying to market it. I'm sure you would be able to sell it. The only thing I can think of that I've seen like it is a book that folds out to make (if I remember correctly) a series of jungle scenes. It wasn't as nice as yours. You could even look at including some miniatures as characters in the story...

[ableman33]

Thanks Red Orc.  

Here are a few pics that got left out of the last batch.


The Title. (Just printed directly over the wall texture.)







Chapel




(Tried to get a light streaming effect as if the stained glass windows really did let light through. I did not make them actually translucent as I had panned to originally because they needed to fold and I did not have any foldable plastic I could print on that would have been strong enough to stay flat.)






View down the stairs.

[ableman33]

Quote:MUMSY said:
     I agree with Red Orc. There is dancing in my heart every time I look at this. Little mini's here or there would be a great visual. Or a dragon lurking near by, or a chamber maid in the Grand Bedroom, or a suit of armor standing in the Armory...........(I want a folding castle now)  

I had originally planned to make this castle in a 1 inch square grid to match D&D campaigns and the like. That would make each 1 inch square equal to a five feet square in "real" life. But as I started building I realized I needed things to be bigger than that (for my fingers at the very least). At 1 inch = five feet, doors would have been 1 1/2 inches tall. As built, the doors are 2 inches wide and three inches tall, double the original scale.

So, either this castle belongs to the king and queen of giants (which would be kind of fun actually) or it would most likely be best suited to playing with action figures or Fisher Price people.

Come to think of it, I can not recall seeing any action figured scaled terrain here before, so that is kind of new too.

Sadly my dragon collection is residing at the house where I play D&D regularly so I won't have access to them for at least a week and a half (we are taking Easter weekend off). I have some Star Wars action figures in the attic that could be posed for some very interesting cross-over pics. If I could find my old Fisher Price castle set with the knight and cute pink plastic dragon that would be perfect.  

[ableman33]

*** END ***

That brings us to the end of the WIP for my folding castle pop-up book terrain.

Start to finish, the project took six weeks, with several patches in the middle where no work could get done resulting in less than four weeks of work.

If I had it to do again, I would have made a few changes:

• Make all the non-wall pop-up elements out of thicker card stock.
• Make each separate 3-D element (like the shelves, beds, stairs, etc.) fully independent folding items that can stand on their own.  These would then be secured in place.  Trying to make the 3-D elements only partially constructed with the castle walls and floors acting as parts of their structures was not only harder to execute, but it did not work as nicely as having fully made elements that could stand on their own.
• Take the time to make my 2-D embellishments blend in better.
  

As I stated at the beginning, this contest exemplified everything that I think is good about the TG community.  I only wish that I had thought to save the WIP threads for the other entries so that everyone could even better appreciate the help and support that was shared.

Happy building.  

[djdjthenon]

Just WOW how did I never see this? I am extremely impressed. You should sell these. I'm dead serious.

[MellyMonkey]

Thank you so much for taking the time to move this project over. It was definitely an epic build. This could probably be condensed down into an article for the wiki site too. Well done Ableman!

[ableman33]

Hello everyone,

I'm not sure how many folks are still active here.

I deeply enjoyed my time with the TG community, but realized that this was not the best place to permanently store my projects and work-in-progress threads.

So, I've taken the plunge and started my own website: handcraftedterrain.com

I lost a lot of my old posts during the TG purges a while back, but I intend to repost all the material I have from my old projects.

That may take a while, though.

In the meantime, you can follow along as I work on my latest project.

Hope to see you all there!