I want to have an assortment of barrels, casks, sacks, crates, chests, etc. available as dungeon dressing, so I’ve started working on some simple basic pieces. I’m hoping to join the ranks of 3D printer owners later this year, so some of the more detailed items will mostly wait until then, but I wanted to make a few items to add some atmosphere until then.

A Barrel of Laughs

I’ve watched a few different videos about making barrels, but I ended up not really fully following any of them. I started by making three as tests, and haven’t really gotten back to making more, but the process will probably be similar when I do.

I started with a few small round pieces cut from scrap XPS foam. I used a dremel to sand down the edges a bit to get them to that barrel shape. At this point they looked like earplugs.

I then drove a screw into one side of each so it would stand well if I wanted it to. The next step was to pencil in the wooden slats and whatever the round pieces are called at the ends of the barrels. I cut some little strips of card stock and hot-glued them around each barrel as metal bands.

These little items probably didn’t need the black-and-mod-podge treatment, but I coated them out of habit anyway. A coat of brown, some different metallic-colored paints on the bands, and a little bit of tan dry-brushing resulted in several passable barrels.

Er… passable, that is, from a distance. Still, I’ll eventually make more, and in a few different sizes, but these will serve for now (and have already seen some use in my campaign).

Crate Expectations

(To be read in a nursery-rhyme sing-song voice.)

Gather ’round, children, and tonight we’ll tell the tale of the geeky man-child who tried to make a pile of DM Scotty style crates for his games. But the man-child lived in Delaware, where the crappy hobby stores don’t carry the little wooden blocks that seem to be easy to find elsewhere. He didn’t want to bother ordering online, so he decided to slice up a bunch of scrap foam into different-sized little squares instead, even though there’d be no natural wood grain to the finish that way.

The man-child painted some of the cubes in a golden brown color before painting in he light-brown slats around the edges… but those crates came out tooooo light!

So he tried a burnt umber as the base color, but those crates were toooo dark!

Finally, he mixed the golden brown and the burnt umber together and painted the rest of the crates… and those crates were juuust right!

(Except that he should have used a better brush, and practiced his painting skills more.)

(Okay, you can go back to reading in your normal voice now…)

I made a lot these because I’ll probably end up using a handful at a time to glue together into stacks on an as-needed basis.