Barn's growing! (Patreon)

Mah friends, there's some progress 😁

First and most obvious thing - I've got the brickwork done. Tomorrow I'll fill the gaps with plaster. Now I gotta say that my workmanship on the smaller shed is kinda shady, I realized it halfway through but decided to just go with it. Instead, I made the brickwork more neat and tighter on the barn - as if it was built earlier and the shed was done additionally by a drunk craftsman. Heck, there's a brick wall in my village with every brick pattern mixed in and it somehow still stands, so why not! 

Next part, which was kinda part of the brick laying process was timber work. This was all done with strips of balsa wood of 1.5 and 2 mm thicknesses. The thing is, you can't just decide to put a door here and a window there. From what I understand, there shouldn't be any odd brick offcuts and ideally there should always be one full and one half brick if you want a sturdy wall. So that's why it was all done simultaneously, bricks kinda dictated the placement and dimensions of doors and windows. 

Obviously the least fun and most stressful part was covering the rear with balsa wood. It should be pretty straight as you can imagine 😁 And I wanted it to seamlessly "blend" into the actual model. In other words, I really dislike when a diorama has visible frame edges, it kinda ruins the immersion. So hopefully I'll be able to pull this off on the building as well. On the shed, I integrated the balsa wood into the brick work and hopefully it won't be obvious once it's filled with plaster and painted. On the opposite end I had to brutally cut off a good 1 cm from the whole structure. At first I made that end into a nice, pointy corner where everything merged, but I didn't take into account the roof, and that thing would go WAY beyond the boundaries of the diorama. So now the building has not one invisible wall, but two, although the second one is less than a cm wide. 

Next is the wood paneling on the attic. Here I'll use thin veneer because I want some of those planks warped and broken just like on the reference photo, and 1mm balsa strip isn't ideal for that. I'm leaving the back "wall" uncut for now because I'm still not sure how I'm gonna do the roof, if I'll just lay the tiles on the foam or actually make a timber structure underneath it. 

And I'll most likely leave the doors and windows for the very end, after all those should be a fun finishing touch after most of the construction is finished! 

Now I'm gonna do some digital modelling so I can 3D print those roof tiles!