Undersized Urbanite - Exterior Siding Done...ish

Spent the week doing three things at once, BUT then I finished two of the things and as a "reward", I decided to spend most of Thursday finishing the egg carton siding on my cupboard house. Which is good because it really needs to be done,...so I can work on other parts of the house...finish the whole thing by May...




 As you may remember, I wanted to incorporate some kind of sculptural emblem into the siding of the house and was using this vintage wallpaper as my inspiration;

(specifically, that geometric looking flower)

And after lots of thinking, sketching, re-sketching, and re-thinking,...I started to put it all together.

 

I decided against the giant square of paper-clay on the front of the house, but I couldn't glue my egg carton stones in place until I knew what the final design would be (Since it's SteamPunk, there were some ideas about using gear shapes, but I decided that sticking gears on e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g would be overkill). So I reworked the geometric flower into something even more geometric, decided to just stick with using egg cartons for the design, and then I got to work.

traced the design onto the template

improvised a few more details as I worked.

With that finally finished, I could now glue on all of those egg carton pieces that I previously cut out (had to make a few dozen more because,  of course, I ran out half way through)

Ta-da!

I think that having the large stones being cut into by the emblem's shape would've looked a bit forced, so I added on a few more sections to the design(more detail-yay!), and am going to try adding some metal elements(metallic paint anyway) in where the red drawing still shows through.

As you may have noticed (either here or the previous post) some of the egg cartons have text printed on them. I am going to paint the siding once I decide on a roof, but it would take a ton of paint to cover the text and that would ruin the texture of my stonework...

 

...Which is why I primed everything with gesso. Dabbed in a couple of thin layers over the text and then just dry brushed the rest. The uneven consistency will help make it look like real stone when it's done.

(The green-ish vertical sections will be covered with paneling later on.)

The side panels(not shown in photo) came out a little darker than the front so they'll probably look a bit older, but I know that with real stone and brick buildings it's usually like that (you spend more time maintaining the what can be seen from the street, so the back of the building ages a little faster).

The siding is glued together, primed, and ready for paint. Hooray!

Now what? Everything else? ...OK.