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Post by whytespirit on Aug 21, 2014 20:15:11 GMT
Hi Crafters As promised some pictures of my cork crafted mushrooms. However, picture quality is dire as I left it too late and the light was poor. My Canon G5 is quite retro now and finds it hard to get sharp images in low light. I will post these for now to whet your appetite [hopefully!!] and will take more pictures when I have time and its sunny in the kitchen. I may even do a tutorial how I carve them. As I progressed from mushroom to mushroom I got better with shapes and form. I tried to get an organic shape to them, a bit of movement and some more detail such as splits, ruffs/collars and curves. I painted them in standard acrylic paint (not my Vallejo miniature paints). I used dressmakers pins to make some young spore like growths - on the purple model. I added a D&D figure for scale and put them on D&D dungeon tiles. You can see an uncarved Cava cork on the far right of the above picture. Its my only one left, have to find some more!!!!! I think I might to sand them smoother, although I like the texture of the cork. I would love to do a morel mushroom which is impossible to carve - you'd have to do a sculpey/milliput imprint to get the dimples... Again apologies for the picture quality. I will try to get better clearer photographs, especially as you seem to only accept 1mb images on this site. I hope this inspires a fellow crafter to save some corks and get carving! Incidently I used a very sharp surgical scalpel to carve them - be careful! They are ultra sharp. It has to be actual cork - not the new plastic wine corks. You could try carving balsa wood as well. There's always room for another mushroom- especially in the underdark. Hey what about ones thats glow in the dark?
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Post by tauster on Aug 21, 2014 20:22:35 GMT
I like the shapes! How long did it take you to make the whole bunch?
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Post by whytespirit on Aug 21, 2014 20:33:18 GMT
Time taken to carve a cork is around 10 or 15 minutes depending on the complexity of the shape. It really doesn't long, especially when you have a shape in mind and looking at the cork you can see what needs to be done. Usual wine corks (ie still wine corks) are thinner and are good for tall thin toadstools, the Cava/Champagne corks (ie fizzy wine corks) make for the half circle mushrooms. I also have an idea for beer bottle tops, but need to find a curved surface to hammer them out on but keeping the crinkled edges.
I've done around 10 or 12 so far, really enjoyed doing them- especially seeing the mushrooms on the website. They really epitomise the underdark - dungeon setting and portray a sense of wonder when you see them.
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Post by whytespirit on Aug 21, 2014 20:36:23 GMT
Forgot to mention the magnets. I saw the use of the tiny magnets and thought if you hotglue the stalks with a magnet and then have a flat magnet base with rocks and debris and magnets embedded within you could have quite a modular system with infinite ways of displaying them!
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Post by beetlewing on Aug 22, 2014 2:03:39 GMT
Make a free photobucket account to hold your crafting photos. They have a promotion going where if you download the mobile app you get 10 gigs of space. It generates a forum code that you copy/paste into your posts to embed the photos.
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Post by wildagreenbough on Aug 22, 2014 3:13:06 GMT
That's a great way to make giant mushrooms. Ever since I first played Morrowind I've liked giant mushrooms in a game.
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Post by adamantinedragon on Aug 22, 2014 3:28:36 GMT
Wow, nice. Were the corks from actual wine bottles or do they sell corks for crafting purposes too?
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Post by tauster on Aug 22, 2014 6:40:20 GMT
Forgot to mention the magnets. I saw the use of the tiny magnets and thought if you hotglue the stalks with a magnet and then have a flat magnet base with rocks and debris and magnets embedded within you could have quite a modular system with infinite ways of displaying them! I can not stress enough how much I love neodym magnets. This stuff enables so much versatility... You don't even need many of them: Instead of glueing magnets to each terrain piece or base and to each piece of dungeon deco whatever, just glue on little strips of magnetic metal* on each. Then put a magnet between the two and you're set. That way you don't even have to think about magnetic polarity. * you can cut cans or can lids, twist-off caps or whatever comes your way
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Post by whytespirit on Aug 22, 2014 18:30:27 GMT
Cheers guys (quite literally!), thirsty work carving mushrooms! Corks were from wine bottles and fizzy wine such as Cava/ Champagne. I've not come across 'virgin' cork (unadulterated by wine) before! I checked hobbycraft.co.uk - they seem to only sell cork roll not corks themselves. Anyone tried balsa wood? I carved some gaming pieces for an Olympic game prototype some years back. Fairly easy to do. I would imagine mushrooms would be easy as cork..
I have got some neodyms and was going to experiment with a steel drinks can covered in dungeon-like debris. If you put two neodyms together I guess they could be difficult to separate? I like your idea Tauser of using the magnet as a temporary glue blob sandwiching the decorative item to its base. Genius!
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