Making quick and easy scratchbuilt barrels

Scraping the barrel of blog posts here. Nothing new from me at the moment, the school exam period is taking up too much of my time, but I did photo-document my procedure for making scratch-built, rusty, battered barrels. So here it is, it may be of some use to some of you..:

1. Using some thick cartridge paper, wrap it around a battery (or similar shaped object). Use superglue to attach the ends to create a cylinder.

2. Remove the battery and cut the cylindrical piece of paper to the correct barrel height.

3. Using the battery as a guide again, cut out the circles which will act as the top and bottom of the barrel. Remember they need to fit inside your cylinder so should be a touch smaller in diameter.

4. To insert them inside the cylinder, I used some blu-tac on the end of a pencil. Stuff it inside.

5. Superglue it in place, remembering that it should not be flush with the end of the cylinder so as to create a lip to the barrel.

6. You can see that the top of the barrel is slightly dented, this is a good thing. I then superglued a bead on the top to act as the screw top for the barrel.



7. I used some fuse wire as it is thin and really flexible; this was wrapped around the battery to create the correct circumference that will go around the barrel.

8. Super-glued into place. Imperfections are ok, this is a battered barrel.

9. Rather creatively (I thought) I pva glued some strips of rusty brown tissue paper onto the barrel, ensuring it covered the wire and smoothed out the protruding edges of the wire.

10. They were primed grey and then a quick burst of brown aerosol was added. Some of the brown colour of the tissue paper shows through. Some rusty washes were applied with some cheap acrylic paints.

11. Scratching on some metallic paint using an old kitchen scourer

12. The last stage was to add some rust texture using a small amount of matt medium and some dry pigment.

13. Some oil spills were liberally dribbled on with Nuln Oil and then some dusty dry pigments added so as to fit in with my barren, post-apocalyptic landscape.