Welcome to the fifth part of the Dark Souls Dungeon project tutorials. Today I will tell you about my experience in building the door and windows part of this diorama.
The Idea
As you know I took the project of representing the initial point in the game Dark Souls, which is a dungeon cell where the player begins the adventure. This time was the turn of building the door and windows of this cell.
The first thing that came to my mind was the type of materials I would use for this build, according to the scale I’m working they had to be something easy to work with but also adecuate for the final result.
The Build
My materials of choice were mainly two: styrene plastic of 2 mm width and wooden toothpicks.
The styrene was used mainly for the structure of the door and windows frames. Since the 2 mm width seem adecuate for the scale I’m working the diorama (1:20) It gives the built of the door and windows the necessary thickness as a metal frame would have for real. The bars were done with wooden toothpicks (but now that I think about it, plastic toothpicks would have done a better job). All these elements were glued with super glue, so the assembly was quite fast, once all the pieces were correctly cut and created.
Once the principal objects were assembled I started with some weathering and scratching of them (this was a pretty much fun part!). For this I used a thin steel file with a pointy edge. The thing here is that it is very easy to overuse this resource and end up messing up the piece, so I had to go careful with this step.
As for the painting I primer with black acrylic and applied gray and white highlights to create a gradient-like coloring before getting to the actual base color.
So when the base color was applied (gunmetal acrylic) thinned down with water, the actual grayscale gradient was still visible but with the metallic color over it.
Tha rust was a crucial part to add realism to this pieces. In this build I learned a new technique with 2 combinations of two colors. The first creating a brown-redish tone applied with a selfmade sponge and the second tone a orange-yellowish color applied with a brush with hard bristles. This combination (also done in selective places) worked very well with the metallic base tone, giving a nice realistic look to the door and windows.
Finally, and to enhance the scratches and holes drilled with the steel file, I drybrushed with silver acrylic, giving some shiny finish to some details.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun with this build and learned a new technique to represent rusted metal (before I had posted a tutorial about an iron gate, which involved some rusting effects also). The most difficult part for me was the styrene bending with hot air of a hair dryer, that I broke some pieces before I got the hang of it and did it right.
Overall, I was very satisfied with the final result and eager to start taking some shoots and video to the whole build.
