Building the Boardwalk!

I'll try and make this a quick post as there isn't that much involved in building the Boardwalk - apart from lots of time and money on my part of course! First things first, I had to find a relatively thick slab of wood, that was both long enough and wide enough to hold all parts of the set that would be on it. Luckily for me I found the perfect size piece in uni, I then went about turning it into the boardwalk. I went to good ol' Pen and Paper in town and brought around five long planks of Balsa wood that I could then cut into strips (as shown in the picture). When I'd cut all the pieces to size and laid them out how I liked, I then went about gluing them down using Spray Mount. I tried using PVA to start off with but it was taking too long to dry and made the strips bend upwards, which was pretty annoying.

When all the strips of wood were glued down and dry I flipped the large slab of wood over and glued on three small planks of wood to the bottom. To reinforce the glue and make sure the planks stayed on I used some brackets to keep them in place. Really I should have done all this before I glued the Balsa wood on but ohh well! The planks on the bottom meant that when it was all flipped back over the boardwalk would stand higher off the ground.

I then painted the whole thing using brown acrylic paint. I used a sponge to get a better coating and before everything dried I went over it all with a dry sponge to try and take off some of the paint and make it look a little more worn. Once it was all dry I went at it with some sandpaper, to wear it out a little more, and then I added small details such as the nails at the end of the planks, using a black pen.

To make the parts that would run along the sides of the boardwalk, and make it look like they were holding it up, I used a load of kitchen and toilet roll tubes. To the tubes that would be on the top of the boardwalk, I glued on disks of card to one end of them. I then painted everything so that it would roughly look like wood and glued everything into place.

And here is the final Boardwalk! For the final image I've added 'rope' around the edges but I shall wait until I reveal the whole thing to show you that!

Thanks for taking a look! Sorry the picture quality isn't the best but I hope to show the final thing soon, and those pictures are pretty ace!