Last month, Joey Royale ran a community challenge on his Discord called the Cheap Freaks Kitbash Bonanza. The concept was simple: each participant collected $10 or less of materials from a dollar store or somewhere similar, then used those materials to create a strange creature. The creatures were loosely meant to represent encounters in Fairhaven, the setting of Joey’s award winning tabletop RPG Weird Heroes of Public Access.
I met Joey at ArcaneCon last year through a great game of Sun Rot that he ran. Since then I’ve seen his Discord grow and thrive as a hub for cool weirdo gamers. When he announced the Cheap Freaks challenge I jumped on board, as I’m all about pushing cheap materials as far as they’ll go.
On February 1st I headed to the dollar store…
My materials
- Foamcore sheet
- Floral Wire
- Small Fabric Sample
- Floral Foam
- Pine Shadow Box
- Bamboo Skewers
- Jute Twine
At $1.25 per item my total was $8.25 before tax. Smashing.
Because scenic work is my specialty, I wanted to focus on more of a diorama aspect than a straight kitbash. I did a quick sketch of a demonic plant hidden in the back yard of a shuttered suburban home, then got to work.
I opted to work in a larger scale to capture some of the mundane details of my abandoned back yard. I built a corner of a brick house using the foamcore. The paper masking from the foamcore was perfect for creating some of the finer details like roof shingles, collapsing gutters, and a vent for a long dead heating system. The windows were made from the glossy cardboard packaging for my bamboo skewers. Those skewers in turn were trimmed, blunted, and flattened to make a classic 1990s American fence. All of this was assembled on top of the pine shadow box flipped upside-down and stained to make a clean display base. A few scraps of foamcore were shaved down with a knife to create natural undulations in the ground. This was an important step, as without it the ground would look unnaturally flat like a video game level.
I took a break from the larger structure to make some bags of insidious fertilizer. A thin rectangle of fabric was folded over on itself and glued together with tacky glue. The resulting pillow-case shape was then flipped inside out. A stencil was made on my vinyl cutter, then used to airbrush on the text.
The armature for my demon plant is all twisted floral wire, doubled or even quadrupled up to create a rigid structure. This was covered in PVA glue and a couple of squares of toilet paper on the thicker sections to hide the wire texture.
The large leaves were cut by hand from the foamcore masking. I textured them using a ballpoint pen while they were flipped over on a soft surface to create veins.
The base of my diorama was textured with old sifted dirt from the back yard. I’ve had the same ziplock full of dirt for about ten years and it’s one of my most valuable modeling materials.
After a quick zenithal prime the piece was painted using almost exclusively cheap craft paints. I focused on creating variation in the different areas like the bricks, the fence, and the roof tiles without making things look unrealistic.
Once my initial paint was in place I could use crumbled old leaves to create crumbled old leaves.
To add grass and keep to my rule of using zero modelling materials (no static grass allowed!) I glued short lengths of my twine to a scrap piece of plastic. I teased the strands apart, then used my airbrush to paint the upper portion green. These were trimmed at an angle with sharp scissors to feather them out and keep the blades of grass from all being the same length.
To create moss I pulverized some pieces of floral foam in an old coffee grinder along with yard dirt. The dust of the yard dirt helps remove some of the static created by the foam and give more variation in texture. I mixed this with some brown paint and matte mod podge, then used a toothpick to apply it to my building. I focused on gaps in between bricks and roof tiles. The moss was gradually highlighted up from its brown to more and more yellowy greens depending on how much sun the area was exposed to.
I separated lengths of my twine into thin strands and rolled them in between my fingers with white glue to create vines. These were glued onto the brick wall as ivy.
I used the vinyl cutter again to cut hundreds of simple ivy leaves out of the foamcore masking. These were painted with the airbrush with a dark glossy green, then applied one by one using white glue and tweezers.
The demon plant was painted up with a mix of greens, purples, yellows, and flesh tone. I made a makeshift human disguise for its hungry vine tongue with leftover fertilizer sacks, then weathered them with washes, paint, and dirt.
I created a few more details like a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign, a looted realtor sign, a mask, and a tempting red ball for my human puppet, and an ominous abandoned dog collar.
And with that, the piece was finished!
In total the only materials I used not in my original dollar store haul were:
- Glue
- Paint
- Dirt from the back yard
- Leaves from the driveway
- Two squares of toilet paper
This was a big departure for me in a lot of ways. It was a new scale, a few new materials, and a completely different setting from the fantastical work I usually do. It’s also explicitly not a playable piece.
I’ve titled it ‘Overgrown’, a simple title meant to channel the Goosebumps books that so heavily inspired the work.
You can take a more detailed look over in the Gallery. Thanks to Joey for running such a fun challenge and for the rest of the community for coming up with some incredible creatures!
If you have any questions about my materials or techniques that I didn’t answer here feel free to ask — I love nerding out about this stuff <3