Tucson I-10 Water Tower Tutorial
So to make the Tucson water tower I started with an empty frosting container. The upper lip of the container has a weird edge on it so I sliced it off:
Cut the rounded ends off a bunch of popsicle sticks. Use the frosting container as a sort of template to figure out how many you'll need. It's also handy to have some hex tiles around and/or Grishnakh's cutting guide to help figure out sizing of the platform for the container:
Cut a few of the popsicle sticks shorter and glue them into a square to support the platform. Then glue the platform sticks onto the support. I wanted the platform to look kinda old and beat up, so I deliberately made the sticks NOT line up neatly. I also went at the sticks with an X-acto knife to cut out nicks and make scratches and scrapes and jaggedy edges. These look AWESOME when you get to the drybrush stage of painting.
While that dries, flip over the frosting container and fill in the gap between the bottom surface of the container and the cylindrical edge of the container. It overhangs a bunch to make the packaging look bigger than it really is. I used some of the 1/8" thick foam, available in a huge pack at Walmart. See my dice tower tutorial for more info on the foam. Cut to fit on top and glue it down. It took two layers for my container:
Next print out a sheet of Grishnakh's hex helper (I think it is file #4 of his in the downloads section) on card stock paper. Use the container to mark off and cut a circle. Cut out the hexes.
Temporarily glue down the white space between the hexes as a guide. Cut the hexes into broken looking pieces and glue them down, then remove guide part.
To get the effect of sheet metal panels welded together, I cut strips of thin brown paper bag. I think they were about 1 inch thick (that's 25 mm for A3N
) Then I cut the strips into rectangles and glued them together such that they overlap slightly. I used a glue stick to do this.
Wrap the strip around and glue it onto the container, then repeat. You may have to play around with the width of the segments so that the beginning segment and end segment overlap the proper amount when you wrap it around. Then repeat the process to add layers to cover the whole frosting container. Then paint the whole thing with a mixture of black paint and white glue as a base coat and "sealant."
Now that the wooden platform is dry, glue on the legs and the cross support beams. I made the size of the platform and the distance between the legs such that they would straddle a five hex pattern in the correct orientation.
Now paint the platform. For the base coat use a very dark brown color, then overbrush with a lighter/redder color. Then drybrush with a lighter color and finally, very lightly drybrush with a very light color over the edges of the sticks and the areas where you made the nicks and damage with the knife. Here are the colors I used and the progressive coats of paint.
Final drybrush coat. In the center of where the water tank will go you can see where I tested the drybrush to make sure the color was what I wanted. I was going for a weathered look.
Paint the water tank using a similar process, but use shades of grey rather than brown. I also threw in a bit of metallic silver paint to give it a more metallic sheen rather than just looking like gray rocks.
Now glue the tank onto the platform and put a book on top of it to hold it in place while it dries.
The ladder is made from coffee stir sticks. They aren't long enough by themselves, so I sliced one about 1/4" down the middle and stuffed the sliced end into another stir stick. Using a ladder as a guide for the distance between rungs and a figure as a guide for width of the ladder, glue toothpicks on to be the rungs of the ladder. I also sliced the toothpicks lengthwise slightly to make them more straight rather than tapered. The toothpicks need to be in pairs in order to hold onto the figure's base. I tried several different types of glue, but the only thing that really seemed to work was hot glue. Other types of glue, including CA glue just don't stick to the slippery surface of the stir sticks. Getting the paint to stick is a bit challenging too. The great thing about this particular project is that I was going for a rickety look, so if the ladder rungs don't line up or have a gob of hot glue on them, it's OK!
Use the same painting scheme on the ladder as before, with the blacks/grays for the stir sticks and the browns for the rungs of the ladder.
At the top of the ladder posts, cut a 45° angle in the stir sticks and cut some other stir sticks with the same angle. Glue together with the hot glue and attach to the side of the water tank. Do something similar for a water fill pipe.
Use a bendy straw for the drain pipe. Once I got the bend radius and length I wanted, I injected a mess of hot glue down the straw and let it cool so that it would sort of solidify and maintain that shape, then attach to the tank.
Almost done now! Next, apply various rust colored shades using the drybrush method. Make the rust appear to run down the side of the tank, especially from leaky water pipe joints and weldments. The last step is to coat the whole piece with an acrylic sealer. I like Krylon matte finish.
I hope you find this tutorial helpful! I enjoyed making the water tower. It was less difficult than I expected and the result was really satisfying!
