The Shire:

Isengard:

Eriador

Rivendell

The Mines of Moria:

Mirkwood

The Anduin

Rohan

Morgul Vale:

Mordor:

The Sawdust of the Past

The Making of...

Scenery Workshop:

More Middle-earth:

Visitors

Pageloads

BRINGING THE LEGEND TO LIFE:

The Making of the Argonath

© Lotrscenerybuilder 2008




A penny's worth of MDF, cardboard and filler… on eBay, these statues do $25 a piece. But it takes hours of drawing, sawing, sanding and coffeeing, it does. We're probably like everybody else in this community, with little time to waste on social talk and birthday-parties, and certainly no medals on the wall for being the local Hoover-champion.



We like to work fast. We simply haven't the patience for spending weeks or even months on a single project; that span of eleven weeks in behave of the Tower of Cirith Ungol was an exception to the rule (however, considering this Tower to be an amalgamation of four different buildings, a bridge and a mountain-range it wasn't exactly a dragging affair). In consequence we do not fuss too much over details. We're quite happy if some piece of wood has the appearance of, let's say, a foot or a waterwheel. It doesn't necessarily have to be a foot or waterwheel. So that's how we approach things: as soon as a fabricated component looks convincing enough we move on to the next. Light and shadow will do the rest.



We use ordinary texture paint to give the bricks & rock the appearance of natural stone. If it's man-made walls, we sand the paint slightly as to imitate an even surface. We've shown you already how we 'age' MDF-walls by breaking them down into pieces and glue them back slightly askew. Just remember that the most important factor that brings your model to life is the effect of light: any object without nice shadows is likely to become as dead as the Dodo. We think it therefore of no use to paint whatever detail onto a model: if a button isn't 3D it simply won't be there…



With the statue finished, the work was far from being done. Of course, the quarry had to be part of our scenery. In order to keep things at a comfortable scale we slightly altered the position of the mining terraces…



… hoping to fool the audience …



Polyurethane foam was added to create the cliffs of the Anduin.

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