A Cavern Prototype

My fellow grumpy goblin tinkers….. today’s tinker brings you an exploration of designing a cavern pool.

Now, before I get started…. I want to give a shout out to Stevie Hoy, painter and designer extraordinaire. Da’Boss is ALWAYS impressed with his work, and his attention to detail, but after spending an hour or so exchanging pics of the “how to“ properly cut and form the foam to achieve the prototype look, did I dive back in and come out with a couple new skills and a bit less grumpy with the final result. Thank you!

Go check out oldskoolcreative on instagram https://instagram.com/oldskoolcreative?utm_medium=copy_link for the plethora of cool stuff he makes.

So. Now.

It has been an eon that I’ve sat on this dream project of building a set of cavern pieces. I’ve put it off for like 20 years, but now I’m building the prototypes that I want before I settle on how to design the masters for this endeavor.

Aaaaannddd, of course I picked the more complicated piece to start with, because hell, why not?

The whole idea of this prototype is to find the right style I want to use for the design of the bases of the Hirst Arts cavern pieces that I am licensed to use. I want this set to have a more dynamic feel than just flat pieces. There will be flat pieces, but the layout of a cavern needs to have more relief. My solution is to use XPS foam as the bases. It lets me build more height into the basic pieces that a cavern crawl will require and look dynamic and compelling enough.

This however is my first prototype of a cavern pool. This won’t be my last. I will prototype a few pieces, decide if I’ve achieved the style I’m looking for and then make the masters for this set, similar to how I made the masters for the Dungeon pieces I used as the flagship product to launch this website. Check them out! I still think they’re really cool! I have another iron in the fire on that front…. But more on that later.

Here is the cavern pool prototype! A future blog will be on how I decided to paint it!

This is of the pool roughed out.

And remember!

We Tinker! You Play!