Finishing Touches for Gruesome Gulch | GGRR 29

Howdy folks, Dave here, alive and well at Thunder Mesa Studio after a longer-than-anticipated break. The first part of the break I was traveling overseas, and that was planned. But when I got back, I came down with COVID, and that was definitely not planned. And I want to thank everyone that reached out with notes and emails and texts and well-wishes. Hopefully it all worked because I am 100% over it and feeling great and ready to jump back into the projects and videos here at the studio. And first and foremost is finishing up the gruesome gulch layout, in time for its debut at Halloween this year, which is just a couple of weeks away. There are just a few finishing touches I need to add to get it show-ready, so let's jump right into those. At the top of the list, I need to finish up the fascia. I've done the fascia on the front sides of the layout, but haven't done anything over on the cadaver-cavern side yet. So I need to cut and fit some 1-1⁄8-inch masonite for fascia panels on that side. So how do we do that? You know, it's not just cutting rectangular pieces of masonite to fit, I actually have to match this scenery contour the best that I can all the way along. And I think the best way to do that is going to be to create a pattern. So here I've got some white butcher paper on a four-foot roll, and from this I need to make three patterns for the three surfaces of the coffin shape that I need to cover with masonite on the layout as a fascia. And the first thing I need to do is measure and cut blanks, basically, from this that are the maximum height and the maximum length that they need to be. I've got a good 90-degree angle on this edge, so this can be the bottom corner. And I need this to be 24 7⁸, 17 1⁸, and we'll call that side one, and we'll call this side two. And that is, you guessed it, side three. Now I can use some tape and pins to tack the blanks in place where I'm going to need the fascia to be. To find the edge to cut to match the profile, all I need to do now is just kind of run my fingernail along here, and that shows me right where the scenery ends. Strengthen that up a little bit with a pencil line, and I can take this back over to my table and cut out that profile. Now I can put the pattern back in place, make sure we've got it right, make any adjustments that need to be made. My contour turned out pretty good, just need to make a couple of little trims on here. And I'm way off down here at the bottom, because I started with the assumption that this was a 90-degree angle, and apparently that assumption is not correct. So I need to add a strip of paper down here, and you know, this is why we do it in paper first. Paper is cheap and easy to cut. You know, if I made that mistake in Masonite, that would kind of spoil the day. That's looking pretty good. I need to cut some access panels in here, at least mark where they're going to be. And this end panel, pretty straightforward. All right, I just need to take these back to the workshop, and I can cut them out of some Masonite. I've got a 36-inch by 72-inch piece of 1⁸ inch thick Masonite here, and that should be plenty big enough to cut all three of these pieces out of. Now I just want to tape them all down with all the straight edges. Do those first. Now for the fun part, I get to cut all of these out with my hand-held jigsaw. Well I've made a big mess, and I'm completely covered in sawdust, which usually means it's a pretty good day. I've got my three fascia pieces all cut out and ready to go. Now I just need to take them back up and put them on the layout. To install these, I'm going to use some Loctite Power Grab all-purpose adhesive, which is good for wood and for this polystyrene foam. The thing I like about it is it fills any gaps, and it grabs and holds right away. Right here, I've got a couple of spring clamps to help me position it in place and hold it there. All right. Now to clamp this in place while the glue dries with some 1¼ inch drywall screws right into the wood down here at the base and into the foam itself. Once the glue has dried overnight, I'll back all these screws out and fill the holes in. Okay, just need to let that glue dry overnight. I've mixed up some Sculptamold now, and I'm using it to ease the transition between the scenery and the fascia. I did this on the front side of the layout also. Sculptamold is one of my favorite scenery materials, especially for something like this. It's a mixture of plaster and cellulose, kind of like plaster and paper mache. It has a nice texture to it, but it's more lightweight than plaster. It's good for filling gaps and things like that and blending different materials together. The texture, when it dries, it gives it kind of a rocky-like appearance. It actually looks a lot like oatmeal, but once it's all painted, it looks pretty good. This will also help when this dries. The glue is all dry on this now, I let it dry overnight, but when the Sculptamold dries, that will also help to hold the fascia into place. This stuff dries harder than concrete. If you've ever tried to remove old Sculptamold, you know what I mean. Right now I'm applying this with a little palette knife, which is used for mixing paint ordinarily, but it's also good for this. One of my favorite tools to use. This will keep a soft paintbrush handy, which helps to dip it in a little water and helps to blend these things together. And one of my favorite tools to use is actually my finger, especially for smoothing things out like this. Here you can see how I bring that Sculptamold right up to the edge and right over the edge to blend that together, and then once it's all painted, it'll be pretty seamless. To make some care down here, I don't want to get it on the surface of the plexiglass that makes the river of souls down here. This circular hole right here, by the way, I don't think I explained that. That's for a speaker. That's where one of the speakers for the caverns is hidden. It's got some black cloth over it, and once all this is painted black, all the fascia is painted black. It should blend right in. Well, I think that's about got it, but once again, I find myself in the position of waiting for stuff to dry. So in the meantime, I've got another little finishing touch I want to add, and we'll go take a look at that over on the workbench. I'm picking out some passengers to ride in my gruesome gulch excursion cars. This is a bag of, I think, about 100 or so figures that I got real cheap on eBay, seated figures made in China, and I've kind of put off adding figures to the cars for a while because I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted them to look. I couldn't decide if I wanted them to be modern or period or dead or alive, and what I finally figured out is a way to do these, which I think is going to look pretty cool. I think modern, brightly painted figures like this would look really out of place. So I'm going to do a little voodoo, a little magic on them. I'm going to need 20 figures altogether for the two cars. I'm going to start by painting these guys all flat black. So what I ultimately decided is to give all the figures a haunted mansion look. This is similar to what I did for the figures in the Haunted Hodown and for Gustav Grusom over on the layout, just painting them flat black and then going back and dry brushing over the top. I've got some granite gray, some titanium white, some light blue, and just a little bit of green. And just going back over, I start with the granite gray, dry brush over them with that. And what this has the effect of doing is it brings out the high spots but leaves the low spots in black in shadow. I'm going to take a little bit of this white and mix in some of this light blue and do the same to go over it again. This is a fairly quick process but I need to take a little care because I want them to turn out looking ghostly and decayed and not like the Blue Man Group. The cool thing about this technique is you can take just about any figure and make them look spooky. And the final pass after the grays and the blues and the greens is just some pure white. A little smoking lady here is a good example of the look I'm after. Don't smoke, kids. You'll end up looking like her. This guy's very indignant about the whole thing. Can't believe he has to sit with all these other dead people. I made the excursion cars with removable roofs so I should be able to just glue these guys in place now. Put some Eileen's Tacky Glue on his backside. Drop him in. He looks like he's talking to somebody so I'll put this girl next to him. I've got the young lovers. Put them in the back. Yeah. And I'll put Mr. Indignant up in the front of this car. He'd insist, I think. I'm going to put this Buxom wench right here and this guy who doesn't seem to know what's going on. I've got this guy looking out that side and I'll have this guy looking out this side. Four figures left over. Maybe I'll do another car one of these days. Alright. I think we're ready for excursions to the underworld. This has all had a chance to dry completely so I think it's safe to back these screws out now. Now I need to sand down all of these holes and the edge where the Sculptamold overlaps a little bit. Make sure there's no chunks on there. Now I can fill all these holes with some good old Elmer's Wood Putty. While that putty dries, I can go back over all of this Sculptamold with my Scenic Base color, that Pewter Gray. Really glad I had to make me up a gallon of this. I've got another little finishing touches type project to work on while I wait for the paint to dry over there. Got some more Mini Prince Jack-O-Lanterns. Also got a couple of additional monuments to go up on Boot Hill. So I'm painting these guys with some Neon Green for inside their eyes and nose and mouth and the rest is Neon Orange, which would look pretty good under the black light in there. While there aren't too many vacancies up here in the gruesome Gulch Cemetery, I think I've got room for a couple of more monuments. I just dry brushed these with some white and gray and I think there's room for this one right here. For the pumpkins, I'll put them right up in here, like they're nestled up in the rocks. This guy wedged in here, I think. I'll put this guy right back here by the bridge. Now they don't look like much with the overhead lights on, but let's switch those off and give you a little preview. That's better. Kind of a Tim Burton Halloweentown vibe. I'll mix some of that Pewter Gray with some lighter Granite Gray and do the final painting on this to blend the existing scenery into that Sculpt-A-Mold I just added. Using a light touch here, not really dry brushing, but just kind of hitting the tops of the texture. You can see the darker gray shows through underneath. Just trying to blend and match the color that's already there as much as possible. Mix in a little bit of that light blue. Just hit the highlights with some pure Granite Gray, dry brush that on. I'm working on the access hatches for the layout now. This is the long skinny access panel that's on the front of the layout. I've cut this piece out. This is some 1-16th of an inch thick MDF, and the center part of it is actually going to be cloth. I've got some black cloth here that I'm going to use. The reason for that is this has a pair of speakers behind it, which provide the soundtrack for the ghost town and a lot of the other things on the layout. That needs to be open so the sound can come through. Now I'm going to spray the back of this with some Super 77 Adhesive. I can flip this over and trim it back from the edge a little bit, come in about a half an inch or so. Now I need sort of a foolproof way to register this over that opening so that every time I take it off and on, it goes back into the same spot. So I'm gluing on a piece of 1-1⁄4 inch square stock on the back, and this will act as a registration block when I take the panel off and on. I considered several different methods for making these panel covers openable, or removable, hinges and magnets and things like that. What I finally landed on was actually sticky back Velcro. It should make them fairly easy to take off and on, and you know, if it's good enough for NASA, it's good enough for the Gruesome Gulch. Now the way to do this so that it will always align properly is to put the sticky back Velcro on with the male and female pieces already joined together, and then you take the tape backing off and then push it into place. Just making sure that this is free of any dust first. Now I've removed the backing off of all of these, and I should be able to just press this into place, line up my registration block. That'll be more than enough to hold that on there too. I use this same sticky back Velcro to actually attach very heavy throttles to the edges of the Thunder Mesa layout, and I've never had it fail yet. Should work pretty well. Now this frame is purely cosmetic. It doesn't really cover a panel or anything, I'm just putting it on here so that both sides of the comp and match here aesthetically, so it looks like a bit of decoration on there. And the two rear side panels go on in just the same way, though their design is a little bit more basic. You can see how that comes off and then goes right back on, just like that. I love it when a plan comes together. Now I just need to finish sanding where I filled all these holes, and we can paint all of this flat black. And my black paint of choice is this Daler-Rowney student grade acrylic, it's ivory black. If you ever wanted to know the difference between ivory black and Mars black, ivory black is a bluer black, and Mars black is a redder black. You can tell if you put them right next to each other. And to apply the paint, I'm just using my favorite one inch filbert brush that I use for so much of my scenery painting, bring it right up to the edge. The thing I like about this acrylic paint as opposed to, say, latex, is this stuff covers in one coat. There is one last finishing touch I want to add. I'm going to have some brass handles on the side. Really helps sell the idea that this is a coffin. Coffin handles are actually known as hackles. These aren't proper coffin handles, these are just ones I picked up at my local hardware store, but I think they'll get the point across, don't you? As long as nobody tries to actually use them as handles, since they're just drilled into some masonite and some foam right behind that. And with that, my friends, the Gruesome Gulch layout is officially finished. Or at least as finished as something like this ever gets. It's been quite a ride. I want to thank those of you who've followed along since June of 2022 when I started on this project. Well, it's finally done. Now I do reserve the right to maybe add one or two things or change a thing or two sometime in the future, but for now, I am done working on the Gruesome Gulch layout. There will be another video coming out, however, that's going to show how I break the whole thing down for travel and pack it up and set it back up again. So keep an eye out for that. But until then, let's just go for a ride, shall we? And enjoy the accomplishment. Thank you so much for watching today and every day. If you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, share, and hit that notification bell to see more from Thunder Mesa Studio. You can also follow us over on Instagram at Thunder.Mesa and find out what's new on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at ThunderMesa.Studio. And of course, if you really enjoy what we're doing here at the channel and would like to show your support, you can do what these great folks did and head on over to Patreon.com slash Thunder Mesa and show your support there. Until next time, keep moving forward my friends. Adios for now.