Book Nooks - Getting Started, The Box, Materials, and Considerations #booknook

[Music] welcome back all of you terrain builders war gamers rpgers we're going to add another category book knockers dalen with another random making encounter and before you all bail and you're like book nook tutorials we don't do no stinking book nooks keep in mind that really it's a bad name for a cool thing really we're kind of tainted by the trope of the diagon alley book nook that's ubiquitous everywhere that you you look and i just want us to think a little bit inside the box and say you know this is a way for us to create worlds unto themselves this takes it almost beyond doing terrain building as a flat exercise and really forces us to think about how do we create a believable world in a really confined space and have something that is very limited in its scale and scope but almost feels bigger and more infinite than it is so a lot of this is about illusion and creating more senses of depth and space than really exists so you know if we think about my my first experience with book nooks really started when i was a kid in elementary school i think we all had to make those shoe box dioramas where you'd get you know you'd have to go scrounge up a shoebox from home and you'd cut the opening in the front you'd put some clear cellophane on it and then you'd cut maybe some holes in the top and put some colored cellophane so you'd have cool light coming in and then we'd have to create some scene from history or you know i think i got some good a's easy a's out of that project because you know i was always kind of a crafty kid and it's much easier to cut up a shoebox than it is to write a really long paper but shoebox dioramas the other thing that i remember as a kid were easter eggs that were sugar and they were hollow and they had a little you know little hole in them you could look in them and inside there was always some sort of weird scene it could just be something like easter bunny and easter eggs but sometimes it could be really like these um interesting religious scenes you know and you just as a kid you know this kind of stuff is like all very woo and mystical and woo-woo and you know but it was cool because you could look inside this egg and there was a whole world inside of it so there's something that is really intriguing to me about creating these microcosms these worlds within a box so let's talk first about the box okay before we get into making a box let's talk about just buying something that could be the box everyone maybe possibly has seen altoid tin dioramas if you haven't they're very cool it's a good idea it's a fun challenge a little small but you could start with just something like these little tins these are available in craft stores they're available online they're for storing hobby materials um spices things like that but you could make some little micro nooks out of i don't think that's a word a thing but it is now because i've called it that and we've made it that and we will all embrace the idea of micro nooking um but these little things could be very cool little micro nooks for even things like i've thought about like individual figures like if i painted like a super cool um d and d and or fantasy and or warhammer figure and i created a cool little scene inside one of these tins um that could be kind of a fun way to just display it so micro nooking another thing is sort of next step up would be to go and find something like these craft boxes so these are craft boxes that are at craft stores made out of craft paper so they're super crafty and they come in a variety of sizes and shapes and what you could do is find one that is sort of a good size for your project and you could cut a hole in the lid very carefully so it's nice and clean and you could build your world in this little pre-made box and they're really nice these are really strong and durable this was a whole whopping three bucks according to the price tag on the back so they're very affordable and these would look super cool on a shelf now one thing that really also inspired me as a disney fan there are little mini dioramas like these that are at disney that you can find in the cool collectibles area and they have little disney scenes in them they're about this size-ish um and so you can create a lot of really cool worlds that you can put on a shelf you can put on a bookcase and they don't have to be this full-blown book nook size so think about things that you can go and find at the craft store and you don't need to build a single thing okay now i'm going to set these aside over here and we're going to look at things that we can build with the first thing i want to start with is the humble cardboard we should not underestimate the power of cardboard and it should be something you probably have laying around um in all of the boxes that you might have kicking around it's pretty available and you can find it in sheets office supply stores you can cannibalize boxes things like that the nice thing about corrugated is it is basically free kind of like beer free like beer i don't know where that saying comes from um i've never been given free beer like free it's just not the norm usually you have to pay for it please post a comment with the origins and meaning of that help me out but the nice thing about corrugated is it is super inexpensive and you can actually construct boxes by bending it carefully so that you're not bending it where you don't want to bend it but you can bend it and you can build your boxes without having to do a lot of edge gluing you can also make corrugated stronger by alternating the direction of the corrugation so if i bent this here and i wanted to reinforce this section so that it didn't do that little bendy i would actually on the inside cut a chunk to be the size that i needed here run the corrugation in the opposite direction glue that in and then when i bent it i would be reinforcing that wall you could actually make a very very think about it shipping boxes corgi cardboard they're super rugged um so the but you know this is a box making material it's not the most attractive ish but if you really lean in and embrace the corrugated and the craft you could do a lot with it just with paper craft and making a very very cool paper craft book nook keep in mind for anything that we're talking about you can cover it so it could be covered with a sheet of some other material it could be something like collaged work on it and you could do something using decorative papers from a craft store used for scrapbooking there's just an any number of things it could be covered with so that it no longer looks like corrugated for the honda mentioned book nook that i did i covered really nice birch plywood with walnut veneer because i didn't want to buy walnut plywood so i covered it with a piece of walnut veneer i don't know if it was saving me any money but um you know it can be covered okay corrugated really good everywhere inexpensive and when used properly super tough okay setting this one aside the next thing i want to talk about is one of my more favorite materials and that is foam core foam core comes in a variety of sheet sizes 20 by 30 up to four by eight ish 40 by 60 big um and it comes in different thicknesses eighth inch quarter inch half inch thicker you can find generally stuff that's in around a eighth inch to quarter inch at hobby stores craft stores and even office supplies not office supplies office supply stores now the nice thing about it is it cuts super clean it's very rigid it's a very nice material it glues up very well and so overall i would actually use foam core as a way to do mock-ups before i moved into things like cutting wood but you can use it to create your own book nooks and it's just super easy to work with so so foam core is a really good option again if you're concerned about the finish it can be covered with a variety of things the downside to foam core um you know corrugated it can bend foam core can bend you have to really work it but the bigger issue with foam core is it can crunch and dent and so you do need to be a little careful with it it's not going to be something it can get damaged with a lot of rough handling if you do hot glue the hot glue can melt the foam a little bit so you have to be careful gluing but overall foam core is a really good option if you're looking at things that you want to be able to cut using regular tools a utility knife an x-acto knife with foam core a sharp blade is actually really important so use a fresh blade snap a new blade on your on your utility knife if it's too dull it'll start to snag the foam and you'll get bunching and tearing of the foam so good material sharp blade foam core love it and very affordable not freeze cardboard but not more expensive like other things another material to just sort of keep an eye out for is things it's tag board map board tag board other boards like this the nice thing about this and i want to use this now more for things like interior elements on my again i'm going to reference the haunted mansion one because that's got a lot of got a lot of plays and people might be familiar with it but i used thin balsa for the interior walls and it's actually kind of expensive and hard to find big sheets and it breaks along the grain really easily super easy to cut but kind of got some downsides i should have just used some tag board um matte board no reason to use anything more than that because i'm going to cover it with wallpaper i'm going to cover it with trim so keep an eye out for things like tag board or scraps of mat board at your local hobby or craft store this kind of stuff is also obviously all of this is available online so tag board another good material and easily cut using a utility or craft knife so now we're going to move into things that require tools so either a table saw some sort of a saw table saw probably um or a laser cutter and now very few people who have laser cutters kicking around and i will be really honest up until very very recently the end of last year i didn't have a laser cutter because they're frankly kind of still not in that hobby sort of price range but because i was doing a lot of fabrication i realized that you know one of the things that was a barrier to me doing more was the speed at which i could build things like cases and using a table saw and building things using traditional woodworking tools is time consuming and i tend to like the precision i can get with other things like cnc 3d printing and so it was time to kind of bite the bullet and get a laser cutter so more on that in a minute we're going to start with mdf because i think as far as building cases it's the least desirable material the reason being is it's a fibrous material that's glued together and the problem with that is if you are just cutting this on a table saw and you're edge gluing your pieces together you really have you really are gluing two very very um fragile surfaces together so if i look if i just pick it this mdf this is quarter inch regular old mdf mdf should not be confused with masonite masonite is sort of like mdf fiberboard but mdf really is different i can just pick at the surface and i can lift fibers off so if you think about it i'm putting a bead of glue down i'm gluing my edge piece on once it's dry all i would need to do is go and i could snap that right off and it would just lift all of those surface fibers and it would break not uber durable now the nice thing about mdf the best thing about mdf is it's extremely dimensionally stable it should not warp if if you get it wet if you really soak it it will swell because it's fibers but generally speaking stays really flat it's very dimensionally stable so i can cut three mil mdf this material on my laser cutter and what i'm going to do with this is use this to cut interior pieces things that are not structural but things that are things that i like walls or light dividers or things where i need a little bit more oomph than just what i would get with a tag board but i need something that's going to be very dimensionally stable cuts really well cut super clean you do need to be careful with fiberboards and and in particular you know when you're cutting plywood or fiberboard especially if you're laser cutting make sure you've got good fume extraction there are some fiberboards that have formaldehyde as their binder or contains formaldehyde so use good dust masks respirator and good ventilation when cutting materials so little little safety psa there but pivoting over to cutting like butter where was i kind of lost my train of thought there plywood that brings us to kind of the the material i think of my current choice for building and that is plywood you can find it in a bunch of different qualities and grades you can find stuff in big sheets it's called luan or you can find um birch ply or other ply that has sort of a nice one-sided surface finish and sort of a junky backside big sheets pretty affordable you can use stuff like this this is birch ply it's got plyum two sides you can find this veneered with walnut with cherry with maple you can find all sorts of different things but in my case i'm really just using three mil birch ply now i was using quarter inch or six mil ply for some other book nooks and i realized that this is overkill you don't really need something as thick as quarter inch especially for something like these little book nooks um and there's a couple reasons why first of all it's i can't laser cut it um but i can cut it on my table saw but um it's a harder to work with from just you know my ease of just being able to zap it out and burn it out but the other thing that's interesting about it is all plywood i don't care who you are what you say it's going to warp you get a sheet that's big enough it will warp in one way shape or form so in a little piece if i've got a half inch piece of plywood and i cut a disc this big yeah probably pretty dimensionally stable but if i have a half inch piece of plywood birch ply really nice 4x8 sheet it's going to probably at some point bow or warp a little bit what you want is something that you can work with something that you can move back into the shape that you want it and so in these little boxes half quarter inch was just starting to get to be a little hard to really push back into square and into flat so this is a nice material but it's a little overkill for what we're doing so what i've moved to as a nice material is three mil eighth inch birch ply so easy to cut can cut on a table saw can cut on a laser cutter and so it is sort of my current material of choice so those are the materials we've got things from humble cardboard up to you know more exotic plywoods things that require other tools table saw laser cutters things to cut so plywood being one of those kind of nice vinyl materials pretty dimensionally stable but it will bow and warp okay moving on to size and stuff okay we talked about what can it be made out of now let's talk a little bit about kind of how big should it be um it needs to fit on a bookshelf kind of by definition a little bit if we're making a book nook we want something that will comfortably fit on a bookshelf the downside here is that bookshelves are all different shapes and sizes so i would measure where you want to put yours or sort of measure your bookshelves to get a sense of if you're wanting to make these for others what a norm is what i've been sort of coming down sort of two sizes is about nine inches deep give or take is probably about maximum depth now part of that's being driven by how much can i get out of a sheet of birch ply these sheets i'm buying are 12 inches by 20 inches and so comfortably i don't want a lot of waste i can get about a nine by nine piece out of a sheet for my sides so that's a little bit of a driver there but nine inches deep nine inches tall feels about book shaped like a nice hardbound book with doesn't matter width can really be whatever your scene is draw is really needing so narrower actually from a creative perspective is harder you have to start to figure out how do i deal with this narrow confined space and make it contain all the things i need to contain so if you've got things that you want thick walls and buildings on the side you probably are going to want to build them a little bit wider if you have something that is a room rooms aren't skinny little narrow things so maybe if you want something that's more of a room nook you're going to want something that's a little wider a little more sort of square presentation on the front i would say something starting off though in the nine inches deep nine inches tall gives you plenty of working space again these can be made out of any material the next thing i want to talk about a little bit is thinking about how we keep things square how we keep things sort of trued up and how do we create space for the things that we need so this is an important design consideration when you're building your your nook we're going to start with our foam corer version here you'll see that i recessed the back a little bit and that was for two reasons reason one is as i'm gluing up the sides to the bottom it's going to want to be skewed so what i want to do is have a way to square everything up if i were to just glue the back right on edge glue the back this way there's no guarantee that i'm going to get that square and get that glued in however if i recess if i inset this back panel i'm as long as i cut the back panel square i know that as i glue that in i should be able to get that to true up the squareness of the box so when you're thinking about building your box your construction you want to have elements that are inset or recessed that help force everything flat and square so that's an important part of this now the other thing is this provides me with an area to glue things like or attach things like lighting so if i wanted to use these little inexpensive fairy lights and light my book nook i could just glue them on the back and that's a little bit nicer and cleaner than just kind of being like and you know plopping it on the back of the book nook so having things recessed gives me some space here to put things another consideration when you're building it is what what needs to go on inside do i have lighting that needs to come up from the bottom the sides or the top so when we think about something like this and so this is my current design for my book nooks here's my recessed space for all of my electronics i should be able to fit a battery pack if i want this to be just done run off of like four double a's i have room for a plug and a switch if i want to have it powered i have room for things like just places to connect leds or if i did want to do more with micro controllers um i have an idea to have a book nook where it's actually on a microcontroller and it changes um see the lighting by time of day i need space for the electronics so that's kind of this electronics area in the back again though it's squaring up everything is squaring up and this is helping me reinforce the structure the other thing that this has is cutouts on the inside to allow me to run wiring for leds and lighting inside regard and it just does i can run them bottom sides or top i keep constantly forgetting to leave space for stuff running wires running lights and so i'm i'm trying to build something that i can just cut glue and then focus on just making cool stuff inside of it and i'm not focused on all of just these things that i keep constantly forgetting so with that in mind i also um added a little thing and this is again considerations you should have an area to run lighting so leds take up space wiring takes up space and so i've created this little piece that now not only helps reinforce it structurally but it gives me a place to drop in five millimeter leds wherever i want them so any holes that i don't need i can simply just cover it with my ceiling material and cover up those holes and just cut out the holes where i need them it's enough space to run wires comfortably it's enough space to mount the leds comfortably even if i wanted to use little neopixels and i have a space already cut out to run the wiring back to all of my electronics so i'm trying to think ahead and anticipate all of the variations that i would need and make it so that i don't keep forgetting about those things you can see that if i put this in i don't know if you can really see it but it's the box is not square because like i said everything bows however having this top square piece and having the top square panel that will go on i can now bring this in i can glue it in and i can just pull everything and this is the benefit of that three mil ply i can now pull everything in and i can square it up so be thinking about what kinds of elements you can glue into your box that help true it up and those elements can be things that help you finish and provide all of the spaces that you need for your nook the very last thing once this is all glued on you might consider and want to think about how do you finish the face of it so again creating something that has a little bit of an edge nice and square this fits really nicely right into this you can again you can see the box is not square there's a little bit of a an edge here because it's just kind of tweaked a little but i can come in i can glue it i can pull that over tight a little bit a little bit of painters tape hold that in place i don't need fancy clamps or anything just pull that in tight glue that up let that set and by the time i've got everything finally assembled in the case i'm able then to actually have a very sturdy very rigid and very square nook small little plug if you're interested in this case and you're like dude that looks cool can i have one available in my etsy shop link in the description um more to come on these i do want to provide you with things that maybe take some of this nuts and bolts um technical crummy part maybe a little bit you might see this as being the less fun part let you focus on the creative part putting the stuff cool stuff inside i'm trying to think of things to make those those parts easier for you so more to come on that um like i said links in the description but the idea here is when you're building these things you want to think about where you're putting your electronics where you're putting elements and then how am i truing up everything and gluing up my box so that when it is finally assembled it's going to be square and it's going to be flat so what did i what do what do we miss we've got what's it made out of what size is it ish how do you true it up make sure it's square how do you think about space for things um that are just the mechanical parts of it i think that's it i think we've covered the bases um whoa easy there as always um i this is just hopefully getting you thinking about options and ideas for your your dioramas in a box where book nooks let's not worry about the name book nook let's not make it feel like it's quaint these can be super cool there are a lot out there um that you can see that are people that are using these to take some of their really impressive set their their models that they've created and painted their collectible items and really creating these worlds and environments with lighting now the next video is going to talk a little bit about how to create illusion and depth and probably a little bit about lighting or maybe i'll split those into two i'm not quite sure yet these tend to run a little long and with that in mind i'm gonna stop talking if this was useful hit that like button leave me comments ask me questions i try to respond as fast as i can to comments i love engaging with you out there um happy nooking happy building happy terrain making modeling rpg i hope you're all happy well and safe and we will see you back for another random making encounter really soon

Channel: Random Making Encounters

Views: 20,353

Rating: 4.8945055 out of 5

Keywords: diy, making, laser cutting, book nook diy, how to make a book nook, book nook, diy book nook, diy shelf insert, boook nook, book nook shelf insert, book nook diorama, book nook tutorial

Id: 5La5i3jj6Kw

Length: 28min 35sec (1715 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021