Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Ports - Trading the use of my Hands for Resources

I must start of this post with a complaint to Sculpey.  Your "Blue Pearl" is damn near impossible to use.  To all you out there wanting to embark on a project like this take note; different colours of Sculpey have different softness levels. There were various solutions on the Internet for softening, but when I tried to go to the store to buy clay softener, they didn't sell it.  Anyways, after making half the water hexes, I had to recruit my husband because my hands were too sore to make the rest of them. I ended up buying two packs of Premo in "Blue Pearl" to mix into my existing clay to soften it.  It made it possible, but my recommendation is this; either only buy the soft clay, or find the stupid softener before you start! I only did half of the foamwich on the water ports. I glued the hexes to the craft foam, and cut out around it, but didn't both with the top part, since the water hexes don't need a number token.

Stenciling ports with stickers & paint
For both the ports and the number tokens, I wasn't sure if I wanted to buy a lot of stickers, or try to paint the numbers on.  As it turns out, I did a combination of the two.  I had bought 2 packages of discount stickers from Michaels, but it wasn't enough to cover all the ports and the tokens.  So I used the negative of the sticker sheet as a stencil for painting.  It turned out really well.  The stickiness lasted for about 5 imprints, which was luckily what I needed for ports.  In fact, the colon stencil lasted for all 9 ports. Be sure to really rub down on the sticker before you paint. It's not fun to try to clean up paint that leaked underneath the sticker.


For the "docks" of my ports I tried a bunch of different things before I found something I liked.  I started off by painting wooden coffee stir sticks, but it was too time consuming to try to paint each individual board on such a small scale. Then I tried gluing toothpicks together, but that got goopy fast, and it didn't look very good.  Then the helpful gents over at the model train store (at this point I really should give a shout out to the staff at George's Trains) came to the rescue, again. Scribed sheets of basswood at a 0.60" scribe were the perfect size for a dock, and were easily cut with my exacto knife. I did a thin wash of brown paint, but you could also use wood stain if you have it on hand.

Now that my blister has healed, I felt comfortable going back to using my hot glue gun, so I glued the docks and resources onto the hexes. I should point out that instead of making a small rock out of craft foam, I just painted a regular stone I found outside, and glued that to my port. To seal the painted numbers, all the ports got a good spray with my triple thick glaze, which also added a nice shiny water effect.

Completed ports for 3D Settlers of Catan


1 comment:

  1. I just showed this to my kids, who love it. We've been enjoying Catan for about a year, and LOVE what you're doing. Such detail! Impressive :)

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