FG Sugar Shack

**willygoat** · #1 10-28-2009, 09:19 PM

I am building the sugar shack from Fiddlersgreen. My mom works at a nature center, and every spring they go to their Maple forest and make sugar at the Cozy Grove Sugar Shack. The stuff is delicious by the way :p

Any way the build:

I have the sugar shack completed and have the trees mostly done. I still have to figure out how I'm going to paint them. I'm thinking about mixing some acrylics together to get the nice dark brownish gray Maple tree color in the late winter.

Here's the shack on the provided base

A close-up of the shack. (You might be able to read the sign I made- It says "Cozy Grove Sugar Shack", just like the real thing)

The sap sled

One of the three wire tree frames

The Sculpeyfied trees

I had to remove the shack from the base as it warped under the moisture of the glue ( I didn't weigh it down when drying. Doh!)

The second base has two layers of 1mm cardboard with perpendicular grains. I also weighed it down with a very heavy dictionary for two days. It's much flatter. I hope to finish this this weekend.

**Paperwarrior** · #2 10-29-2009, 05:02 AM

Looks pretty good so far. Great work on the shingles!
I look forward to seeing it finished! Keep us posted.

**willygoat** · #3 10-29-2009, 08:20 PM

Thanks paperwarrior.
The shingles weren't too bad. It was more of a pain to edge color them than cut them.

I will have a couple of hours free tomorrow to get paint and get the trees done. It should definately be done by Monday though.

**ct ertz** · #4 10-29-2009, 08:33 PM

Wow, cool. If you gt hooked on buildings, I just put up an 1880's era church in the downloads section. You are doing a great job on this FG model, by the way. I may have to try some of those! I haven't done a build in a while, got sidetracked with designs. Maybe some FG models are in the future for me. You inspire.

CT

**Spar** · #5 10-29-2009, 08:42 PM

Really good Willygoat. I also look forward to the complete model with the hand made trees.

My model train club has a few FG buildings on it's main layout including the sugar shack. The only thing is that we're in Florida, and everybody mistakes it for a tanning shed.

**willygoat** · #6 10-29-2009, 09:31 PM

Thanks CT and Steven.

That whole tanning shed thin is funny. Maybe that could be a new model :D

**willygoat** · #7 11-04-2009, 07:27 AM

Here's the finished product folks.

The wire and Sculpey trees were painted using acrylic paints

I painted a base layer that was a 5:2ish ratio of Espresso to Vanilla. This lightened up the brown enough to somewhat resemble a tree in late winter.
I tried to detail the trees with a bit of snow on them or at least to look a bit frosty. I actually achieved that, but then I looked at the base. The base is all green and in full bloom. So, I went over the white paint with a couple of super thin coats of brown. It ended up giving the trees a nice highlighting, without being too bright

Then, it was time to put the trees on the base and look at it

The base was another on the fly adaptation. I had initially planned to do two layers of cardboard and I put the grains perpendicular to each other. Well, even with putting a ginormously heavy book on it for 4 days, it still curled. So, I took some extra plastic sign material I had and super glued the cardboard to the plastic with the grain of the plastic material going perpendicular to the curve in the cardboard. Then I just measured a 7mm wide strip of paper and wrapped it around the edge of the base. A black marker took care of the coloring.