Working With Paperclay - an update
Entry posted by hydroped
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I'm afraid there aren't any photos for this update but I wanted to let everyone know why the heck it's taking me so long to finish this up. Every night I work on it... I live with the next day on the kitchen table where I walk by it several dozen times.. and that night I start again trying to fix what I did the night before. This has been going on for about a week. You might be asking what could be so tough? What you messing up every night. Well I may have mentioned I"m not the greatest with paint. So I started out with my blank paperclay.. and gave it a nice light wash.. only it wasn't all that light so I had to wash as much off as I could.. but then it still wasn't quite getting in all the crevaces as dark as I wanted so I went back over those with a darker wash but then couldn't get all the dark off the stones and had to try to wash it off again.. and then I painted the roof..... and of course it dripped down the walls :angry: which I wiped off.. but again it doesn't all want to come off so I had to try to wash it off which took off some of the paint under it too and then I added the windows.... and it looked ok till I realized that I just couldn't live with some of the gaps between the windows and the walls.. small gaps but gaps none the less and they had to be filled.. so that left nicely painted (sort of) walls but white paperclay on the edges - no problem I'll give them a nice wash and they'll blend in... or not. The wash went on but they did NOT blend. Ok so I started in with other colors to the stones randomly - Wow! Nutti was right add those other colors helps a LOT!!.. except I still couldn't get the patches to blend in.. Finally I decided I needed to just paint over the entire thing to just cover it all and make it a uniform color which I could then add different color washes too and I chose a nice light grey... which dried about 2 shades darker than it went on :lol: And Now the chappel and the roof were almost the same color grey! :lol: So tonight I repainted the roof a darker slate color.. but it still was very bland, dark and flat looking and the washes of color were now not showing up so well on that flat dark grey stone.
So after thinking and contemplating I finally found a use for that bit of sandpaper that came with the kit (the same sand paper I almost never use on the kit edges)... I sanded down the entire building! I left all the detail and some of the thicker paint but took off most of it and you know what ? I think this just may work! I've added a few more bits of paperclay. I've got about half the details on that have been bugging me - my nice octagon openings in the entrance look like round portholes <humph> so I'm edging them and tomorrow when I'm more awake I'll finish adding the rest of the stone edging and after that... back to painting this time with very light transparent washes of color :lol:
So what have I learned from all the paperclay on this building?
1. It really helps if your clay is uniform thickness - it helps give the building a uniform look that way all your groves between blocks is about teh same depth and all the block has about teh same texture and what ever shrinkage you have in the paperclay will be uniform throughout the build.
2. The thicker the paperclay is the more it tends to crack 
For some reason (at least for me) it seems to shrink more if it's laid on thicker perhaps it's something to do with the tensile strength of it and shrinking the way there is the least resistance <?> so where ever you make an impression (morter line) it will crack and then tend to split even past the impression but if it's thinner the shrinkage perhaps goes into it thinning against the wall rather than thickening and cracking.
3. When painting.. very very light washes. To get a lighter color you don't really need to keep adding white paint (which is the first thing I always think of) but instead use a little paint and a lot of water so it looks like really thinned out watercolors then just apply in thin coats and a sponge brush helps keep it from dripping. If a drip does start you can use a dry sponge brush to stop it.
4. Just like Nutti said - unevenness in painting can really REALLY be helped by adding other colors in thin light washes in a random pattern to your stones
5. Random patterning isn't as hard as it sounds if you remember to sometimes wash the same colors on conecting stones.. so it's not polka dot but actually random, some touching, some not, very unevenly distributed. I had a tendancy to want to make it even and not have any stones of the same colors next to each other.. to be really random some of them would have to be next to each other.
6. Paperclay takes sanding really well :lol: and is actually pretty durable stuff!
Tomorrow if nothing else there will be photos of the sanded exterior
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