DIY Disneyland Haunted Mansion: Cardboard Tutorial - Cat House with cardboard scratcher floor

hello and welcome to clay to canopy the show where i attempt to make just about everything from the ground up [Music] for those of you who are new to this channel my day job is actually teaching art courses and one of the classes i have is a 3d course and i have tasked my students with creating a cardboard sculpture that is inspired by a theme park in this video i am going to be turning this paper model into the haunted mansion cardboard edition when i was planning this tutorial i really wanted to capture my favorite theme park ride and for me that is definitely the haunted mansion and so i went online to try and find some pictures i stumbled upon this page called haunted dimensions and haunted dimensions is actually really awesome i connected with the owner of the page ray and he was really great guy and was kind enough to allow me to use his model working off of for this tutorial if you guys um have some time you should definitely go check out haunted dimensions and i will throw up a link to haunted dimensions in the description box ray offers a whole bunch of different paper models that you can print out that are completely for free he does ask for donations if you want to support so check him out ray's a really great guy for this tutorial i am going to be working off of this paper model and scaling it up to create my cardboard version now you do not need to work off of the model but i highly recommend working off of a model when i was in art school i absolutely despised model making i would end up working myself into a corner where i would have to completely start all over again because i didn't have a model to work off of models can be really refined and finished or can be really crude depending on what your purpose of making that model is for most of the add-on pieces here are not glued down for example i just used some blue tape just to get these columns in which is why it looks a little bit rough but that is because as i'm working i'm going to need to be taking things off dealing with some measurements now as i was going along and assembling this i did write down a list of my measurements that i'm going to be scaling up and hopefully it's enough that i won't need to fully rip this apart i will be making a later video in where i convert this into a finished piece by adding some wood siding i will probably turn the columns out of wood and details like that adding some glass for the windows if you would like to check that out please make sure you hit the subscribe button if you are not subscribed it totally helps me out if you are starting from scratch go ahead and make yourself paper model a cardboard model in a smaller version just to work out the ideas and then from there you can scale everything up that's where we're going to start today all of my dimensions will get multiplied by four and that's how i'm going to measure out my cardboard i'm going to begin with the inside structure cutting out those pieces and building from there some of the tools you're going to need to get going will be a hot glue gun with some glue sticks a straight edge to do your cutting with some kind of box cutter or cutter an x-acto knife might also be handy for a craft knife if you're doing some smaller detail work some paper tape and if you are working with the paper tape you are also going to need a bucket with some warm water and a sponge to apply you want to be aware of whatever you're cutting on because you will need to have the knife go through the full layer of the cardboard and that can totally chop into whatever surface you're working on so you can either use a dummy surface if i have an old table top that i throw onto my counter you could just use an extra sheet of cardboard underneath it as a cut down surface i do not recommend trying to cut on concrete or on the ground because the knife will dull out really quickly so having that extra layer of cardboard under it will give it the blade a knife soft place to land and it will prolong the life of the blade if you have a cutting mat that's a great place to go first thing i had to do was to scale up my numbers so i decided i wanted to do four times the size of this original model and so i just multiplied all of my dimensions by four so now i can go ahead and begin cutting my pieces i'm gonna cut all of my pieces mark them out in pencil before i start assembling that is exactly the same process i used when i assembled the model i have my dummy table surface that i am going to be cutting into it's a great time to use a pencil for the sake of this video i will go over my dimensions with the sharpie markers that way you can see them better here let's remove some of the parts so that you can actually see behind it [Music] ray if you're watching i'm sorry don't freak out i promise you in the end this thing will look spectacular when i do my second video okay so i am working on this square here this wall it's a 26 by 26 square that has this small chunk out some of the dimensions i did kind of round up here and there just gonna put a tick mark in two places one a little further away from the other [Music] again don't be like me don't do this in marker do this in pencil so that if you make a mistake you can erase it so now i'm just going to join my two little tick marks [Music] okay so according to my model i have five inches in by seven inches down and it doesn't matter which corner i pick to do this in now i'm going to keep straight edge as my cutting guide i want to make sure that i firmly hold down the ruler and i'll be using the edge of my blade to cut up against the guide this is a very thin ruler so i have to be careful that i don't accidentally poke myself and i don't know if you can see this on film but if you're staring at a piece of your cardboard you'll notice that there are little ridges i'm going to be cutting what's called across the grain of the cardboard because i'll be cutting through those bridges rather than slicing with the ridges when you are slicing with the ridges it's a much easier cut but it also is really easy to screw up because you can end up following the grain pattern and end up with a crooked line so you're going to need more resistance when you are cutting against the little cross grain but it will also be less likely for the blade to kind of waver on you i'm going to spin this around as i knock everything off of the table my goodness i'm going to place my ruler on the side of the good stuff so that if i mess up and the knife kind of wavers i'm cutting too little rather than taking off too much much easier to go back and re-cut something that wasn't cut off enough that you didn't cut off enough of than it would be to try and glue something back on it just looks bad i mean it's doable but it's not going to look that good i want to make sure that i'm keeping the ruler on the good side of the cut so this is the piece i'm preserving that's the excess the rulers on the inside of that make sure you don't have your fingers in the way of the blade [Music] now i'm going to remove my little excess piece [Music] okay so before i set this aside i'm gonna go ahead and label this thing on the back side i am gonna take some blue tape and label my blue tape and put that on it so that i can carefully remove the blue tape and before i go smacking this blue tape onto the piece i am going to relieve some of the tact and to do that i am just going to pop it on my hands pick it up a couple times this is just going to remove some of the tack so its less likely to stick i'm going to continue on doing all of my cut what i will do though is post a listing of the dimensions that i've made at the scaled-up version so if you want to make just the haunted mansion you will have those dimensions it is basically going to be a giant cat fort by the time i'm done i'll go ahead and throw those up on the screen i did not put in the cutouts for the doors and windows i wanted to give you the option to either paint or maybe try out some of the techniques that i'm going to go over in this video i've cut up all of my main parts and then i started to go in and mark out where my windows and my doors are gonna go what i noticed on the model is that all of the first floor windows are pretty much the same size including the shutters and second floor are the same and then the third floor are all the same so i made myself these little templates because this is a disney building disney uses what's called force perspective what force perspective is is that the bottom floor is going to be your largest floor and as you go higher and higher up the floors get smaller and smaller and what that does is that when you are actually standing in front of the building and you are looking up it makes you believe that the building is a lot larger than it is now this might look a little bit wonky for us once this is made because i'm going to be much larger than the building itself however i'd imagine that if i were a cat in that forced perspective will kind of work the same i marked out my windows and i am going to be removing the windows so that they will have something to view out of and the shutters i will be applying on top when you are going to be putting on add-on details it is much easier to do them in flat working with just one side i will be cutting these open i know that these are where the doors are going to go these doors are going to become three-dimensional add-on pieces that i will glue on after i took apart my square this is a much heavier ruler this is great for marking things out because my ruler does not have that little extra gap that some rulers have so if you look at this one there's a little bit of extra space here that doesn't quite meet at an inch so i have to keep adjusting doesn't quite start at the zero line this is pretty straightforward i'm gonna do the same thing here i'm just going to be cutting out just the inside [Music] my blade is getting a little dull you want to keep an eye on your blade there's a lot of cutting to do and these blades can get dull fairly quickly if your blades are dull you're going to get jagged cuts for the shutters i just cut out a little piece of scrap cardboard that is the same size as what i've marked out i wanted to make sure that the corrugated part of the cardboard are running through the length so i'm looking at the short end and looking at basically the grain and i want to be able to see the corrugated on the long side of the piece and then what i did was i just took a ruler and kind of eyeballed where i wanted my little border line and it's about an eighth of an inch if i was to guess you want a really sharp blade now you can either use your box cutter or your exacto and what i am doing is scoring i'm not making a full cut i'm just dipping my knife in deep enough to get through a couple of the layers so i should be cutting the furry top layer and then cutting through corrugated part which would be the middle layer and i'm following just along the inside of my border always watch your fingers make sure they are not in the way of the knife okay then i'm going to dip my knife in right at the top layer and i just want that first layer of the paper and once i have the first layer of the paper up i'm just going to peel you might have some residue left behind you can just take your blade and kind of scrape and there she is let's take a quick look at the techniques i used to apply my little details for my recessed panel doors i marked out all of my rectangles and then scored along the inside lines where the recessed panel would be i then made sure i erased all of my pencil lines the next step was easy i just pressed in my rectangles i added a second layer to my door opening that i did very similar to the shutters i left the side with a little bit of corrugated exposed and then some windows cut out where i was going to put in the faux glass for the faux glass i took ziploc bag and taped it to the back side of the top layer of my door where the openings for the windows would be i used my blue tape here and tried to make sure that the blue tape was not visible through the window shield any of the excess blue tape that was left i used my x-acto knife to trim up around the outside edges i then applied some acrylic paint around the backside of the windows i just gave it a thin coat so you could still kind of see through the windows a little bit and then set this aside to fully dry before i moved on to the next step once my paint dried i hot glued my two layers together i used a sharpie to add some decorative detail to my windows once all of my little parts were made i could hot glue them all to each of the sides since this was a cat house i made sure that one of the sides that was not going to have the porch on it had an extra large opening for my babies to crawl through before i could begin assembling i needed to make some corner braces these were just some very simple l-shaped pieces of cardboard but i was very careful to make sure that each one was square to make my life a lot easier i used some blue tape to help hold up the sides temporarily as i began to assemble the first thing i did was to apply my corner braces with some hot glue at the top corner and the bottom corner where each wall came together to reinforce each corner i applied paper tape paper tape is very easy to use you just take a damp sponge and moisten the adhesive shiny side to activate the glue then run it along the inside of the joint and generally i like to follow that up with a damp sponge just to help smooth it out and make sure it adheres well be sure not to over saturate your paper tape the cardboard is sensitive to excess water i've got it assembled and i have my windows attached the next move i'm going to make is to apply some trim just to give it a little bit more of a finished look and i cut up some strips i will be cutting these up and hot gluing them on so [Music] the porch is filled with this gingerbreading i knew that was going to be a really difficult thing to cut so i went to the 99-cent store and picked myself up some paper doily and i also found some acrylic paint there and i'm happy with the quality you do want to make sure that you get the one that says acrylic and not poster board paint because that's a temporary paint so there were two different kinds there they look very similar actually this was at the dollar tree that i went to i'm just going to quickly go through the process of what i did to get my faux ginger breading look i just eyeballed the archway and made myself a little template and then i went through cut out all of my pieces for the length of the porch and i just kind of played with where i was going to draw in that profile and i use a little bit of artistic license here i didn't want to be spending days on end dealing with cutting but i wanted enough to give me the hint of what that arch was if you are working off of pictures by all means you could take that picture and blow it up on a photocopier and just cut it out and use that as a template so once i did that i cut out all of my negative space and just painted on some black acrylic paint you don't want to use thinned out cheapy version of acrylic paint you want to have something that's a little bit thicker pleasantly surprised that the dollar store stuff was fairly thick you want something thick because they are water-based and the more water in the paint the more likely you're going to get bubbling if you don't have a thick acrylic paint something you could do is just leave the paint jar open for a day or two the next thing was to go ahead and paint up my doily i just have a scrap piece of cardboard that i rested this on the process itself is not tricky it's handling the doily once you have the paint on that becomes the the issue so i did this in stages [Music] i tried to do at least half and then what i would do is very gently pick it up and now it's going to be really delicate here so i set this aside on a clean piece of cardboard to dry so once it was dry it became a little more stable and i could handle it to paint up the other side once my doily was dry i laid this over looking at my curves positioned it took a pencil and traced just cut it with a pair of scissors if you are doing multiple like i have here it might be a good idea to do this for one and then you know go ahead and cut out a bunch of paper ones to use as your template take some mod podge and if you don't have mod podge you can use watered-down elmer's glue will work the white school glue and basically with this stuff you just apply some of the glue down first the piece you're gonna be setting in and then you're gonna top coat [Music] i'm okay with a bit of overhang because once these dry up i can go ahead and trim them from the underside with my exacto or my craft knife and then that's fine i basically this was the process i did and went around and finished cutting up the doily and any of these little extra pieces here and there is what i used as a reposition for the remainder of the [Music] pieces [Music] so it's time for me to start putting on my roof the roof can be one of the most trickiest parts to put onto your piece one of the simplest ways to put on a roof is an a-frame type of house just your basic triangle sitting up there with a slanted on one side something more like peak would be here on my model so the first thing you want to do is take the measurement of your width and then you need to determine do i want an overhang because most houses the roof overhangs just slightly seven inches i'm going to cut it at eight inches giving myself a half inch on each end for an overhang so that's the first measurement you want to make the overall length of your piece that you're going to be cutting the next thing you want to determine is how high you want the peak of your roof okay you know i want it to be i don't know six inches high whatever that measurement is once you have those two dimensions you're going to go ahead and cut yourself a rectangle i've determined my center point connect the center point with the bottom and you'll go ahead and line up your center point cut that line [Music] and there's your triangle once you have this you can just take another piece of your cardboard set it up here to mark out your dimensions and trim it down to what you need and then it's ready to go and what if you want something that's more like my model here you're going to just take a piece of cardboard and cut some notches in it so that you can position it on your piece here depending on which direction that you want to start out your first angle i'm going to go with this direction just to make it a little bit easier for you to see take a scrap piece of cardboard and then on that angle you're going to just go ahead and play with how high do you want this you know where do you want the peak to go do i want it up here do i want it down there once you've figured that part out make a mark and trim down your cardboard and have yourself a cut down piece the next thing you're going to do is kind of similar to that first triangle you're going to find your center point and from your center point you'll go ahead and measure off your triangular pieces because my roof is really broad i wanted to give myself a little bit of a flat similar to my model i just guesstimated picked two inches and put in a tick mark for my center point and inch on each side i'll just be cutting from the one inch out mark or from here to here so i end up with a triangle with a flat top i've cut two of those and then i put in a little paper hinge all that's left now is to take the measurements of what this triangle is going to be i thought it would be easier to my assembly to cut out a second bottom that will sit on top so i'm going to go ahead and start assembling my roof [Music] so the very last thing i need to get onto my sculpture are the columns my columns are actually a tapered column having the paper model really helped me out made some notations and then multiplied by four but of course if you are not using a paper model i'm going to show you really quickly you'll go ahead and do your measurements off of your sculpture determine where you want your columns to go at least the height of the column and then you need to determine the width of your column if you are unsure the best thing to do is eyeball the width that you think you want it and multiply that by two that'll give you a starting point so for the sake of this i just have a scrap piece you want to make sure that your grain is running along the length of where you're going to be doing your score cut i'm looking at the corrugation here and so that when i do the scoring i'm running the scoring along the grain line measure three quarters of an inch tick marks along the way you can vary this maybe you're making carousel so you need to make posts that go up in the center or you're making roller coaster rye that has a lot of posts i'm gonna put tick marks every three quarters of an inch and i'm going to do that at both the top and the bottom so i give myself two tick marks once you have your tick marks marked out you just slice through the top layer of paper this is just a scoring i'm going to do this all along my tick marks [Music] okay now comes the fun part and just go ahead and begin bending and cracking [Music] figure out how much you needed cut it down to the size that you need and then i just ran a hot glue gun up along the side of it and my column was done for the tapered column measure your top slightly less distance than what your bottom is how much you take off the top will depend on how drastic your pitch is going to be so i have 10 inches in width well first thing i'm gonna do is mark my center point i'm going to take this down to six inches i have six inches between this point and this point and now what i'm going to do i'm going to line up the tip mark at the top along the bottom edge and take the cut repeat for the other side put a tick mark at the center point bottom that'll be my first line so i'll go ahead and draw that in the tighter your lines are together the more curvature you're going to get for the sake of this demo we're going with five lines i know i want to get two more lines in between so i need to divide this up by three so five divided by three so my distance here at the top is one inch and the bottom is about an inch and five eighths still have the same number of lines so here we go and score all right and then it's the same cracking deal you have a tapered column now obviously if i was to glue this together it's kind of jutting this way so you'd have to go in and make some adjustments you can just kind of guesstimate at about what this is and usually i'll just flex it along the edge don't need that much it's just a subtle curve take your subtle measurements and then you can trim off the excess again this is a bit trial and error so it might be best you just do this with some scrap there we go it's got it standing upright a little bit better there so um there you have it a tapered column i have one last thing to add on to this haunted mansion before i cannot make a cat dwelling without adding in some cat scratching action for the scratcher floor i began by cutting up two inch thick strips of cardboard lots of two inch thick strips of cardboard next i ran a bead of hot glue down the center of the cardboard and began stacking the pieces i adjusted the length as needed to fit the floor plan of the house i continued to do this process of gluing and stacking until i had enough to complete the entire floor of the house it is time to take a tour of the completed house [Music] so [Music] and i'd like to just take this time to say another big thank you to haunted dimensions you really really made this process go so much smoother all right you guys that's all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed this video please like share and subscribe if you have not done so already and we hope to see you soon [Music] there's a monster in the house you're gonna get me

Channel: Clay to Canopy

Views: 5,076

Keywords: cardboard, cat scratcher, cat, cat house, disneyland, haunted mansion, diy, tutorial, cheap craft, crafts, easy, cats, fort, cardboard techniques, paper tape, hot glue, house

Id: enB6rFk7l-c

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020