Old And Ancient Wood

I came across a great tutorial on artificially aging wood over here at Xrestore, a clock restoration site.

New wood looks a lot different than old wood. Old, unfinished wood often has a dark, dull gray color resulting from oxidation over time. When stained and/or finished, new wood will continue to look noticeably different than old. In order to cleanly integrate new parts into an old case, the new wood needs to be aged.......

Aging of wood cannot be achieved with stains or finishes. What is needed is a means to actually oxidize the wood fibers, but in a much short time than occurs naturally.

There are products on the market for aging wood and they all work to one degree or another. As an alternative to commercial products, I have found that some common household products can be used to very effectively oxidize and age wood.

The needed solutions are simple to make an use. The results are very impressive..............

Combine this treatment with some careful physical distressing and you can convert a cheap craft box from Michael's or the Hobby Lobby into an ancient coffer suitable for all kinds of eldritch artifacts.

Behind the Pallid Mask

While I appreciate the link from Behind the Pallid Mask, I do have to admit I found some of his dreams somewhat disturbing. Then again, that's rather the point of his blog. If his planned scenario is half as good as some of his dreams are it's going to be a must-have.

At The Mountains Of Madness Expedition Patch Sample

Here's the final sample of the ATMOM expedition patch in physical form. The project was slightly delayed because there were some small problems with the initial embroidery patterns, but those were easily fixed thanks to the great folks at the company that's actually producing the patch. Just click on the picture to see the full-sized scan.

"At the Mountains of Madness" Expedition Patch

I'm getting ready to dive into the massive "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" adventure for Call of Cthulu and one of the props I'd like to produce for the party is the embroidered patch from the original Miskatonic expedition. Is this something anyone else would be interested in? I'm going to need about ten copies, but I'd prefer to put in a larger order since the price per patch goes down significantly as the order size increases.

This is the design I'm leaning towards right now, but I'm open to any suggestions you might have. Do you like it? Hate it? Any way I could improve it?

Update: Here's an alternate version with a touch more color. I'd already filled in a bit of the southern and eastern bay area of the continent, but as several commenters have pointed out it would be more realistic to have a less-detailed coastline.



Update: This is the current version.

Retouching Cthulhu

I've started experimenting with retouching period photos to give them more of a mythos flair. This is one of the products of my first efforts.



Hopefully all this experimenting will pan out and I'll actually be able to post something useful in the near future.

Curious Goods

"Curious Goods" focuses on props from the "Harry Potter" books and films, but it also includes items from "The Golden Compass", "Eragon", and a host of other sources. The sheer amount of material the author has created, from a crystalline Philosopher's Stone to a baby dragon, is amazing in both it's quantity and quality. Tiffany offers a variety of free materials for your personal use and her advice, in particular the tutorials on aging paper and faux wax seals, is applicable to a multitude of CoC-style props.

A Little of That Ol' Time Religion

It's amazing what you can find on the memory cards of your old digital cameras. Here are some pictures of the first props I created for my "Call of Cthulhu" game way back in the early 90's. Keep in mind that they're heavily compressed, since image size really mattered back in the days of 56k modem connections.

First off, a Cthulhu statue carved from coral for use in the blasphemous rites of the Deep Ones. Although I always like how this one looked I was never happy with it's actual construction. It was about 8" high, sculpted out of regular Sculpey over a wire armature. The terrible mushiness of the polymer clay was a real pain to work with and it took me hours to add the coral texture using a stamper made out of a bundle of toothpicks.


This next one was a generic "Old One" statuette that consisted of a mass of writhing tentacles around a single eye. I was able to incorporate a lot more detail because I finally figured out how much better Super Sculpey and Sculpey III were for sculpting compared to regular Sculpey. This one was about 6" high.





Finally, we have this Cthulhu statue. Although it looks pretty simple it was actually a complicated piece to work on because I was trying to incorporate a believable marbling into the sculpting material. The picture doesn't do the finish justice, since I ended up with deep, intense purple filled with black and metallic silver swirls.

Stop snickering. That's a great color scheme for a Cthulhu artifact. Heh.

The final statue was around 4" high and also marked the first, and last, time I attempted to engrave Sculpey after hardening.




Sadly, all I have left of the statues above are the pictures you see here. I sold off most of my original Cthulhu props on Ebay in the late 90's when I moved back to New York and didn't have enough room to store them. If you happen to be the current owner I'd love to hear from you.