Wumby's Workshop: My first commission: Outhouse Groom's cake topper.

After a conversation with one of her co-workers, my wife informed said co-worker that I could make an outhouse for the groom's cake's topper. (I, like a good husband, completely forgot the story that made this piece personal.) Without further ado:

I used the woodplank mold from Hirst Arts and I had some leftover Excalibur (dental plaster) from when I bought 50lbs of it years ago.

What's left of 50 lbs. I didn't follow the instructions on HirstArts.com this time, and ended up spooning it into a plastic cup, then adding water. Since I'm limited in my supply, I attempted to be frugal and had positive results.

Spooning, mixing, and pouring. You do want to overfill the mold so the bottom of the piece can be scraped flat. The next pic is just those pieces I wanted cast, filled up, then scraped flat in the lower two pictures. I originally was going to use some of the roof pieces from another mold, but found some corrugated cardboard, which did the job more realistically.

...and the mold after scraping:

All right, here is one of the wall pieces, one of the larger planks, and a roof piece (which wasn't used) after curing and popping out of the mold.

I'm hoping that I have the scale correct to match the toppers, but what I ended up doing was having each wall 3x2 of the "6-board" pieces. The door was the same, but I added the support "z" with the larger planks.

You can see where I started peeling apart the cardboard in the above picture that will become the roof of the outhouse. The door is below.

Pictures start to get sparse here. I forget to pause and take them while my muse has taken over. I used the legos to hold the walls together as they set and used Aleene's Tacky Glue to stick the pieces together. It works, I'm not 100% awed by it, but I like it. I was fearful of breaking the door piece when making the "moon" so instead of cutting it into the door, I glued a piece of shaped plastic. (I think the plastic was simply the lid of one of my spray-paint cans.)

I don't have any WIP's of painting, but let me try to sum it up. I primed it black, using Armory Primer. (Not my favorite brand, it works just like Krylon...since this project wasn't high detailed, I wouldn't have used my P3 or Citadel Primer on it.) I then dry-brushed the walls with Citadel Scorched Brown, and gave it a lighter drybrush of Reaper Pro-Paint Oiled Leather. I then washed it with the old-old Citadel Flesh Wash, a layer of Citadel Badab Black, and some Ogryn Flesh wash, also Citadel.

For the roof, I painted it Citadel Foundation Adeptus Battlegrey, stippled on some Reaper Master Series Carrot Top Red to get a "rusty/aged" look to it, washed with Ogryn Flesh, some Badab Black, and Citadel Gryphonne Sepia. I did a final drybrush with some stippling of Citadel Mithril Silver to give some of the edges that "rubbed-shiny" fresh look. I also painted the moon on the door with P3's Thamar Black. Once the paint and washes were dry, I attempted some minor "dirtying up" with Vallejo Pigments Dark Yellow Ochre, and Natural Siena. Then set it all with my old can of Krylon Matte Finish. I don't always seal stuff, but since the pigments were on there and it was going on top of a cake, I didn't want it to fall off into the chocolate.