Nerd Craft: Miniature Crafting a Throne & Crown

June 17, 2015

doll furniture, throne, small scale throne, doll throne

Throne and an example of wooden trim used to make decorative elements.

Hey Nerdarchists, I’m still working the next dimensional illustration (sadly this weekend was jam-packed with shooting videos and gaming- I know, you weep for me right?), but I figured I spend the time to show-off some of the miniature crafting I did for the last shoot in a lil segment I’d like to call “Nerd Craft“. The main set pieces were a throne and a crown worn by the king figure.

Doll Furniture with purpose.

What I make are essentially quick and dirty doll furniture pieces that look good for the photo shoot, but probably wouldn’t make muster for a miniature crafting connoisseur- and when doing research, believe me, I’ve come across some outstanding examples of hand-crafted doll furniture. While working at a scale that’s most approximately 1:6 scale, I try to find pieces that I can more or less jigsaw together to make a decent representation of the object I want in the shot.

The chair was made out of hobby lumber, narrow wood trim and a wood embellishment (purchased at a hardware store), fabric, and just a tiny bit of aluminum foil (for chair stuffing). Before shopping for materials, I did a rough sketch of what the chair could look like and then in my little Philadelphia, PA living room, which I’ve converted into studio space, I measured, sawed, epoxied, painted, and Fabri-tac’ed this doll furniture chair into existence.

A royal crown (made of paper and tin foil!).

The king’s golden royal crown was made by drawing the contours of the crown on heavier stock paper (Bristol board) and then cutting that shape out using an X-acto blade and I used Fabric-tac to glue aluminum foil to that cut-out shape (see, foiled again!) and kind of burnished the outline of the crown shape to the foil so I could easily trim the excess. From there, I Fabric-tac’ed the crown into it’s rounded shape, did a couple of passes of gold acrylic paint, and those little golden rivets are actually decorative nails that I just pressed through the paper, put a little Fabri-tac on the inside of the nail, and pressed them into place. And there you have it, a relatively decent little crown.