Look to the Right!

The announcement for Best Miniature Blog for 2012, by About. com http://miniatures.about.com/od/miniaturescommunity/ss/2012-Readers-Choice-Best-Miniature-Blog-Winner.htm was made this morning. WE won for the second year in a row. Thank you for all of your votes and support for the last month! Tessie is off somewhere celebrating right now....She and the rest of the crew are partying up a storm. I am left all alone to work and write....How sad?....This should be twice as fast as usual. I need to find something for them to celebrate more often....Back to work. I have three very boring photos to show you this morning. Please keep reading. There are prettier photos to be seen later.

I am working on the slate roof now. Very gray and very blah so far. The first step is to put a wash over the whole side to cover the printing on the cartons. It IS a wash. Very watered down paint. It is a mixture of Ceramcoat Hippo Gray, Charcoal, and White to start. I don't want three separate colors, but I don't want one solid color either, so I mix as I go. Before I am done, I will have gone over it many times. A dab here and a dab there to change the color of different areas. In the second photo, I have scored between the wet shingles on the bottom eight rows. You can clearly see where I stopped.

The top part doesn't have as much wash on it and is drying fast. I will go back in and do some more painting and then score that part.

It is hard to tell what I did with the painting in the photos. In a couple of places you can see where I have made it a little darker at the top of the shingles, under the next course to make the edges stand out. Basically, I fuss with it until it looks right.I tend to use the same approach that I would use if I were doing a painting of a roof. Darkness under the front edges here and there and lighter tones dry brushed on the bottom edges to further emphasize the contrast.

Here it is with all of the basic scoring. I will go back in and do it again in some areas, where it doesn't seem to show as much.

Paint and score. Paint and score some more.

When I get the paint part looking the way I want it, I will let it dry thoroughly and then start shading with Prismacolor Pencils. That's when the roof starts to really look more like slate than egg cartons.

Hang in there. This is going to take a couple of days. Meanwhile, here is something to keep you amused.....Remember I promised you pretty photos at the start of this? Here you go.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/cottages/ I stumbled upon this site this morning. There are over 4,000 wonderful photos of cottages from all over the world. I have not had time to explore it fully yet, but I think that I am going to be distracted a lot by this site. I want to build at least ten different ones so far.

If you double click the first photo you will get a larger view. If you double click that one, it will take you to the slide show. For those of you that don't know, as well as setting the time of each slide to a number of seconds, you can go down and pause it. Then when you go back up(still on pause) you can stay on each photo as long as you want until you click it to move. No pausing and then clicking it to go again that way.

Have a wonderful day, wandering around the world, dreaming of the next house you are going to build in mini. I know I will....No, wait. I have to finish the Weaver's Workshop.

See you tomorrow.