Day 7: Ground Work

A basic pre-viz sketch of the grounds-arounds Rana's Cottage. Creating this helped tremendously with seeing what I'm going for out of cardboard. Now I know how to build the land between the front porch level and the bottom of the creek bed. (see photo below)

I've been making sure to take an actual physical step on building the set each day. Many of the steps were too dull, such as taping paper down on the floor, to document in a post so I just noted them in the Twitter window on the scroll, at right.

Here's the thing, I found out last year that the only progress I made on actually building the set came from doing something each and everyday. I think, and formulate, and create the project in my head constantly, but building it? Funny, that seems to take actually doing it. Most nights over the last week I was too tired to comfortably do anything but I pushed, at least enough to do SOME thing. It wasn't "fun" per se, NOT AS FUN AS THINKING ABOUT STUFF IS, but making progress gets me C-l-o-ser to working on the hyper-fun parts of it. And friends, the fun stuff is like Crack.

So, so far I've roughed in the stream bed out of cardboard propped up on empty boxes. Next will come cardboard flats held up by tubes support legs. Once the landscape is completely roughed in this way, the next step will be to begin the build up of land topography with clumps of newspaper and masking tape which will then be hardened with layers of paper and plaster mache.


It doesn't look like a week's worth of work but the building materials are organized and the stream is taking shape. And one thing's for certain... this stage would not be done today if I hadn't inched my way towards it each day.