Building an Ancient Cliff Dwelling

Howdy folks! Dave here at Thunder Mesa Studio and I'm back in the canyons again because this week I want to finish up this entire cliff face which joins up with Horse Thief Canyon that I finished a couple of weeks ago. Now this cliff face has a great big alcove in it where I want to build some Native American ruins, a cliff dwelling, which brings up an interesting question. How do you model ruins anyway? Now one of the interesting challenges about this particular piece of scenery is this entire hunk is built into an access panel. It actually pulls out so I can get to the wiring and the future animation for the balancing rocks up here. Like most of the scenery on the layout, this chunk of cliff face is made from layers of XPF, that's extruded polystyrene foam, and I've gone into it extensively in other videos how I shape and carve it. So in this case I think I'm just going to jump straight ahead to the sculptamold part. That's where I go in with some sculptamold, which is a plaster and cellulose compound made for crafting, and kind of finish off the rock work, fill in all the cracks and crevices between the layers of foam, and blend it all together and make it, you know, generally look more like rock than like layers of foam. I wanted to show you, I've also printed out several photos, just some black and white prints on my laser printer, of different ancestral Puebloan ruins from around the southwest. This is Mesa Verde, which is in southwestern Colorado, and this one, this is Montezuma's Castle, which is right here, not too far from Jerome, over in Camp Verde. I've been there several times, and I'm kind of going for the look of this ruin right here. But, you know, it's going to be a kind of a freelanced ruin, not modeling any specific place, because there are literally hundreds of thousands of ruins like this throughout the southwest. I mean, they're not all in national parks, believe me. Some of the more obscure ones are kind of hard to find. You've got to hike out to find them. So, I've got my reference material ready to go. I'm over here in a place where I can make a nice mess, so let's mix up some sculptamold. I got about two cups of dry sculptamold right here. Pour that in. Notice I add the water just a little bit at a time, because I don't want it to be too wet. I want it to be sort of a thick, thick oatmeal, thick paste. There we go. That's about what we want. If you've ever made mud pies as a kid, this is a very similar... You're well-trained for this. Some of my favorite sculpting tools, most of them adapted from other uses. These are palette knives for mixing oil paint. So is that. These are actually sculpting tools for clay, which I don't get a lot of use out of, to be honest. Where do I want to start? I'll start up here at the top. I want to blend these rows of foam together. I've got to have some water close by, and some paper towels, too, which is very handy. One thing I like to do when I get the sculptamold on here is break up the horizontals a little bit. The horizontals are important for showing that, you know, those layers of strata that you see here in the southwest, but you also want to break them up every now and then with some diagonals like I'm doing here. And as this starts to dry and set up, I'll go back and sculpt these a little bit, folks. Can you feel that? Yep, that's a time-lapse coming on. Here it comes. Well, we've gotten to the point where the best thing is probably just to leave this alone, let it dry for a little while. As it sets up, it gets easier to push into shapes, until it doesn't. Until you can't do it anymore, like over here. Yeah, let that dry. I just want to show you one thing. Look at that. I mixed the perfect amount of sculptamold, and I would like for you to believe that that was a result of my, you know, expertise and experience, but it was totally... totally luck. Totally luck that I mixed exactly the right amount. This isn't quite dry yet, but I wanted to go ahead and start on the surrounding cliffs that butt up against this piece and get some sculptamold on those, so I made up another batch. I also want to try and disguise this joint here a little bit better on this side. Not much I can do about this one, because this is two sections of layout. Maybe I'll do something when I work on Coyote Canyon over here, but I'm trying to disguise this... this zigzag line where these come together a little bit. Blend all this in and get that all up to a higher level of finish. For the longest time, my... my intention was to hand carve all of the walls for these Puebloan ruins. I was going to use some of this good old polyurethane gold carving foam, which I love to use for stone walls and stuff like that, but then I remembered that I had a whole box of Hydrocal wall castings that were sent to me by a good friend, and so I'm going to use these. I'm kind of mixing and matching the different wall pieces that I have and gluing them up and, you know, kind of eroding them away and breaking walls apart with some... some sandpaper, some flat files, an emery board, and even a Dremel tool. I've got a sanding bit and a Dremel tool here in a low-speed setting, and I can go in and kind of take off some of the stones just like that. Of course, it's very dusty. I need to put a mask on before I do any more carving on this with the Dremel. It's really important to use a slow speed on the Dremel. Otherwise, these Hydrocal walls will easily shatter. I've got all the walls I need, but I also need to paint this alcove back in here before I can install them. So I'm gonna take everything out, paint all of this back here, and then I can install the walls, blend them in, and finish the paint job on the rest of the cliff face. Back inside the ruins, I would like to have the look of a flickering campfire, like maybe a bandit or somebody's camped out back there. So I'm going to bundle a couple of different LEDs. This is a five millimeter amber flickering LED, and this is a five millimeter yellow flickering LED, and I think if I bundle them together, a nice look of a campfire back there. Inside the ruins, first I need to solder on a couple of resistors. These are some 510 ohm resistors, and you always need a resistor on LEDs on the positive lead, and you can always tell the positive lead because it's the longer of the two. If you're not familiar with LEDs and haven't worked with them before, that's the one. The reason you need a resistor, by the way, is that these LEDs only take like 1.5 volts to light. You can light them up with a button cell battery, but if you want to have a lot of LEDs, using a button cell battery is not really practical. You have to have it attached to some sort of some sort of wiring bus system. I use a 9 volt DC wiring bus for my lighting, and it's just one of those brick style transformers you can get, and that way you can have a whole bunch of different lights all on the same circuit, but you have to put a resistor in there to keep the LEDs from burning out from the higher voltage. Okay, resistors are on, and now I can add the wiring. For the leads, I have some 28 gauge solid core wire, and I like to use black for the negative and red for the positive. Go ahead and solder on the negative leads first. Oh, the flux capacitor. A little dab will do you. Okay, now I connect these bad boys together. Probably a good idea to test right now, make sure everything works. Handy-dandy 9 volt battery. Boom. Success. Now, since this little bad boy is going into a removable panel, I want to next solder on a little micro plug, which I have in my scrap box, thankfully, so I can just unplug the whole thing and pull it out if I need to access anything underneath the layout there. There. This end will get connected to some wires to the 9 volt power bus. Now that the Sculpt-A-Mold has had a chance to dry completely, I can put a coat of the Scenic Base Color on, and this is the same gallon of latex paint that I had mixed up to use everywhere on the layout. Actually, this is, I think, the third gallon of this color that I've had to have mixed up as the layout has grown. So, first step is to get a coat of this on here, nice and even. Once this is all colored, I can finish up those Hydrocal walls and blend them into the scene. I also want to go ahead and get some paint on all of this at the same time, so everything will be more or less on the same drying schedule. While all of that dries, there's a little more detail work that I can do on these plaster walls. I want to drill some holes to accept lodge poles. I'm going to make lodge poles out of these wooden toothpicks, and those are the poles that would go through, you know, that you see in southwestern buildings that stick out the side of the wall there. And it started with this ancestral Puebloan architecture, and it's carried over to this day throughout the southwest. You see it everywhere. But these were the originals, so I'm going to drill some holes. I've got a 3-32nd of an inch drill bit here. I'm just going to carefully drill a few holes for lodge poles about two scale feet apart. By carefully, I mean trying to do it without cracking or shattering the plaster. These will be stained and stick out through the holes like so. I'm not going to install them yet. I'm actually not going to install the lodge poles until I put the ruins into the seam, because they need to go all the way through back to the cliff wall. A lot of times, you'll see in these ruins that where the lodge poles were, that's where the walls would often fail or where they were blown apart. A lot of people don't know when they go to see these ruins that oftentimes they were found in pristine condition. They weren't actually ruins. They were just empty structures, but they were often blown apart with dynamite by treasure hunters, pot hunters, which of course is extremely illegal now in the southwest. But back in the day, the 19th century, those thieves of time were pretty active. So you'd often see the walls just blown apart, which is what I'm representing down here. The methods of construction on these ancient ruins could differ quite a lot from place to place. In some places, there'd be no mortar between the stones. By mortar, they just often would just use mud. I mean, they'd use a limestone mud. In some cases, the walls were plastered over. In some cases, not. And again, it was just a plaster. It was a limestone mud that they would use as plaster. But I am going to simulate a little bit of that, I think, with some spackle to create that sort of plastered over look. I'm just kind of smearing it on here in random spots. I'm also using it to hide this corner where the two pieces of hydrocal have been glued together. So that's kind of the look we're going for. And then once this is dry on all the wall pieces, I can go ahead and get a base coat of color. I'm going to use the same scenic base coat that I'm using on the scenery because I want it to look like it was made from the same local material. Well, I think this is dry enough that I can get a dark wash on here now. In the spray bottle, I've got a mixture of Mars Black and Burnt Umber. Mars Black is sort of a warm black or reddish black. You don't want to use a real dark or a true black on here. Let's soak back in all those crooks and nannies. I think it's safe to get some paint on these pieces now. Now I have a color that's halfway between my dark scenic base and the lighter highlight color. I'm just gonna go in and kind of hit the high spots here. I'm not gonna do this whole section right now. I'm gonna do the rest of it while it's in place over there. I just want to get this alcove finished so I can install the ruins in there. Now I can go back and do the same thing again with the lighter scenic base color. Get two carried away. The rest of this can be done over in the scene. One thing you always, always see where these cliff dwellings are, where these ruins are, is soot stains on the ceiling from, you know, hundreds of years of campfires. So I'm mixing up some black and burnt umber acrylic. Dry brush this on. Get the look of soot on the ceiling. Any place that smoke would escape and come up naturally. I have that represented. Now I can start putting all of the pieces together. This is one of those instances where it's gonna look terrible until it looks good. Then it's gonna look really good. Most important thing with these pieces was getting painted on the backside where I will be able to reach it later. I made up one more small batch of very thick Sculptamold. I'm gonna use that to blend all of these pieces into the alcove walls down along here along the floor. Little bits like that. You can see why I didn't want to do full finished painting because a lot of this is gonna need to be gone over again. Okay, I am ready to finish up the painting on this. I stained these toothpick lodge poles so I can start putting those in next. Just sliding them back into these holes that I drilled. Some of them I want to be kind of bent or broken. I'm pushing these through all the way back until they go into the foam in the back wall there. I think I can do the rest of the finish work on this over in the scene so let's go plug it in. Now using the same paint colors in pretty much exactly the same order I just have to blend everything together. I do believe we're in the home stretch here and I've already started to put in some bushes and weeds and things like that but before I get any further I really need to dirt things up with some real dirt and some real rocks glued into place on here and that's what really makes this look realistic. It brings the whole thing to life and I want to start down here on the bottom actually because this this is not supposed to be rock. I've kind of built this up with foam but what this is really supposed to represent down here is a talus slope which is something you often see below these old cliff dwellings, these ruins. This would also be where they would throw all their trash, all their junk from from the centuries of living up in these Pueblos. They would just throw it over the side and it would collect down here. In later years this will just all be rocks and broken pottery and corn cobs and things like that and bushes which grow up all in here. So I'm just going to try and make this look like a talus slope by painting on some white glue. This is some diluted white glue. I just mixed enough water in here to make it spreadable so I could put it on with a brush and this is just for the first pass of rocks. Give them something to stick to so they don't all just fall down onto the floor. And as usual I'm using real rock and dirt collected around Sedona Arizona and up in Utah around Moab and Bluff and places like that. I put a piece of masking tape down here to keep it, once again to keep it from falling onto the floor. Throw it up in there like that. This is a more rocky mixture. Got some loose pebbles and things in there. Sprinkle that on. Let that fall right down like so on the ledge. I'm choosing colors of dirt that match and complement the colors of paint that I need. This I don't want to move around so I'm going to spray this with some wet water which is just regular water with a couple of drops of liquid detergent in it to break the surface tension. Get some sand and dirt up here on the top layer. This transitions from the roadbed and Devil's Garden. Balancing rocks here. Let that down. Now I like to go back and put in some bigger rocks here and there. Might have fallen down, broken off and fallen down. Tells a little story. While all of that stuff is drying over there, there is one more detail I want to build and that is a Pueblo ladder. A lot of times with these cliff dwellings, they didn't have doors. Sometimes they did, but a lot of times the only way to access the interior of the structures would be up through a ladder and then down through a hole in the roof and that was presumably for defense against attack by enemies. So I'm going to build a Pueblo style ladder here and these are just some juniper twigs. This is that kind of ornamental juniper that grows along curves in a lot of people's yards out here in the west. I cut some twigs off, uprights, and now I need to make my treads and we'll just make those out of some twigs and these ladders they have a couple of distinctive characteristics. One of the uprights is much longer than the other and that's so when you get up to the top you've got, you know, something to hold on to and they always splay out wide towards the bottom so they're wider towards the bottom and narrower up towards the top. Finishing touches on the scene with some ground foam, Scenic Express and Woodland Scenics, some bushes, some weeds, some flowers. One of my favorite bits of desert foliage to use has become this kind of gray blue green super turf which has a similar look to a lot of sage out here. It's always spring in Thunder Mesa so I'm going to add some flowers. I'm going to finish up with some cactus and yucca. These yuccas are laser-cut paper from Rail Scale Models. These prickly pear cacti are injection molded plastic and these are these are from Pegasus Scale Models. All right, well I think this scene's about done. Now I'll come back in the very near future and sand and repaint the fascia down here to make it all nice and pretty and this whole section will be pretty much finished at that point. But I'm going to call it a day on this one right now. Well, I don't mind telling you I had a lot of fun with this project and I hope you enjoyed it too. If you like seeing this kind of thing, don't forget to like and subscribe. You can also go over to my website thundermesa.studio for projects like this, artwork, model kits, and more. Or follow along on Instagram at thunder.mesa. Until next time, keep moving forward everybody and adios for now.