Tiny Western Air Temple from Avatar: The Last Airbender

[Music] cardboard glue scissors paint long ago the four nations lived together in harmony then everything changed when the scissors attacked only the avatar crafter of all four elements could stop them but when the world needed them most they vanished a hundred years passed my brother and i discovered the new avatar a crafter named devin and although her cardboard skills are great she's got a lot to learn before she's ready to craft anything but i believe she can craft the western air temple [Music] you may notice we have run into a slight issue here we have run out of space or have we it's all free real estate the western air temple i genuinely cannot say in words just how much avatar has shaped my life if my interests were a solar system avatar would be the sun in which all else orbits around previously on avatar i actually did make a version of the western air temple back in high school kind of the first miniature that i ever made really we're doing it again before we start i am opening a patreon you may be asking yourself how can i support you when i cannot even support myself why do you think i'm making a patreon in which case skip to the craft oh my goodness buy your groceries that being said if you want to throw two dollars at the channel honestly just thank you i didn't want to make one until i felt like i had enough to offer in return because i really don't take any of the support for granted there will be some additional content including the making of the intro of this video with that being said we are starting by making the top of the cliff and the side with two pieces of cardboard i'm gonna size it to the shelf on that i drew a rough layout of where the temples and other key elements would go the placement might change but we just want to get a good idea there will be five temples included at various sizes i honestly thought there was gonna be more but let's not purposely add tons of extra work so i went ahead and hot glued the two cardboard sides together at the corner then i needed to start making the relief of the clip we're battling gravity again you know what that means we're paper mache again i've talked about this way too many times briefly who's sick of this we use tinfoil to make rough rock formations since the scale that i went with was quite small pretty thin vertical sort of shapes now that yeah that was a bad one very painful now the spot where the gang sets up camp is an overhanging platform that's sort of built into the cliffside i did try to create an area for where that would go as well with the cliff jutting out also build out some areas where there's going to be platforms and details with paper board and cardboard and then using newspaper and your preferred method of paper mache to cover over everything so i decided that i wanted to make that platform first so that i could size everything based on that and also incorporate it into the cliff so i started by painting the sky bison mural which was completely unnecessary but super fun sometimes i do little pointless detail work to sort of break up some of the really monotonous parts of long projects i say that at the very beginning of the project everything's going great then i made the fountain basin out of cardstock painted the floors and really just started putting everything together attached the painting of course filled the fountain basin with hot glue water made some pillars out of foam core attached trim on the bottom with cardstock pressed it with a rock to create some texture and sort of give it more of an age to look and then painted and attached the pillars after i was that far i realized it was too big it's making me tear ben so it was extra useless and i had to remake it at a different scale finished off the paper mache around it incorporating everything into the cliff and then i did my first base coat this whole process was much like the cliff in aunt josephine's house so i went in first with the airbrush light brown color to just cover everything as best as i could and then started layering in highlights and shadows i attached that platform to the cliff then it was time to start the temple the design of the western air temple was inspired by tibetan buddhist temples the creators specifically mentioned tiger's nest in bhutan which is built up into a cliffside just absolutely beautiful the architecture on some of these temples is just so incredible recommend checking out some of the videos they're just absolutely breathtaking and what better to replicate this beauty than a bunch of cracker boxes so i started out by drawing a flattened version of the side of the temple so that i could know what sizes i needed to cut the pieces to be drew a box of how large i wanted it to be and then i drew the temple inside of those lines each tier is made up of a box with a square base a top that is larger and overhanging which will create the outer walkways and a roof sloping up to that cut out all of the pieces that i would need for each tier and started assembling them i assembled all the box pieces on top of each other first and then went and added in the rooves after some of the wall pieces need to be a little bit taller than you would think because we are going to cover some of it with the roof it's too tall what else is new the very top of the temple comes to a point cut a pointed really thin strip of paper board and attach that to the middle of the top roof and then use sort of triangle-shaped pieces of cardstock to create essentially a pyramid that leaned into that center beam [Music] from [Music] now that we have a full signal of temples it's time to go and do all the details on them i wanted to create that stone sort of texture on the walls so i used my paper mache mixture flour and water when i'm using it for a texture i like to keep it on the thicker side you have a little bit more control brush this on quite randomly essentially the same as these steps in the hobbit hole project once they look like a little bit of a mess you know you have done it correctly then we had to start creating the roof texture ramen noodle yarn are we just making at josephine's house again i don't know toothpicks would also be a really good option for this and would probably make things easier to paint that being said that would be a lot of toothpicks that i did not have cutting the yarn and laying it on each roof dividing it vertically into sections i actually didn't do this pattern totally right it's not how it looks in the show i also used a little tiny bit to wrap in between the pyramid and the point created a small border in between the top roof and the base of the pyramid section one roof down 24 more to go yeah i've just finished this one and it is now fully dark this might take a little while welcome to day two of yarn gluing good to have you here depending on the size of the temple for this part i unraveled the yarn sometimes to create thinner pieces when it was a smaller temple arguably one of the lengthiest parts of this whole process just a lot of doing this a lot of different times in a bunch of different sizes i'll spare you some of the time just know that i was there gluing things to the temples for a long time now the roofs are green and the vertical beams are gold my vertical beams were a little bit thick so you see a lot more gold than maybe you do in the show i decided to start off by airbrushing the yarn this is when any flaws in your construction will make themselves known yarn is not always the easiest thing to paint with a brush was this a great idea who knows not me a lot of metallic paints are a little bit sheer so i did an undercoat in a light yellow and then i went over with the gold because it allows the gold to adhere a little bit better after that was done i had to go in and try my very best to paint the actual roof part green in between all of the gold pieces this was not easy i must admit i was not particularly accurate but we did our best if you get a little everywhere well let's just say it's part of the weathering process then we wanted to paint the walls to look like stone so i went in with a base gray color and covered everything and it's really just starting to dry brush on lighter and darker shades to try and bring some of that texture that we created earlier out i layered on some of the darker shadows especially where the wall meets the roof did a couple of passes of this i wouldn't say there's a science to it and there's also probably a better way to paint stone than this but i do think it ended up looking pretty cool after i had done that i decided that i need to create some of those shadows on the roofs as well i went in with a darker sort of gold brown color in the inner parts of the roof here's hoping you can kind of see the difference here and also i did the same in between with a darker green then i went and painted the underside of the rooves that are the walkways so i really just created a kind of warmish gray concrete kind of texture with some darker and lighter shades to be honest i don't even know which temples they're on in some of these shops but on some of the temples where zuko and aang practice fire bending have this green pattern on the walkways dividing them into squares why am i so bad at being good i don't think the specific temples that i'm making have these but i just really liked them we're just doing what we want there's nothing more humbling than the reminder that the temple you've been working on for many hours is in fact just a cracker box then we have to go in and create those small doorways and windows that are on all the temples now you totally could just paint these on or you could actually cut them in but i went in with a sharpie because it gave me a little bit more control and since they were such small areas i just went ahead and drew them on in all of the sections that had doorways that were a little bit higher up i went in and added paper board ledges painted them gray to blend into the rest of the building now in the show obviously the air temple has been abandoned for quite a few years so there are a lot of overgrown areas first used glue and just covered those areas with dirt to create the texture and then i went ahead and painted over it in a mossy green color and it sort of gives that textured moss effect i painted on some really fine vines and the final step of this was adding the dollar store reindeer moss for some extra depth and also creating more of a 3d effect with this i was also able to sort of have some of the vines hanging down as this is coming together in the end and like in most projects sometimes things need to be altered so there were a couple of areas that i needed to build up more with paper mache and created some of the walkways that were connecting some of the different pieces on the bottom and extended this area and now we gotta paint again we're really just trying to make sure that every piece can blend together it doesn't look like it but believe me we'll get there i also was not done with doing the final texturing on the rock paint job for the cliff side trying to add some more contrast and like dynamic range that i didn't get with the airbrush originally painted in some of those detail areas there are some sections with statues there's also a couple of little rooms or tunnels in the cliffside that are a little bit lower then i sort of did some of the same steps that i did on the temples so i added in some dirt to a bunch of different places on the cliffside because uh cliffs have dirt right then i went ahead and painted in the spots where moss was part of this was winging it and part of it was looking at where there's moss on the actual thing then i could use those areas to go ahead and start layering on the reindeer moss [Music] [Applause] [Music] even if you're lost you can't use the love because it's in your heart [Music] before we put everything together we need to make some tiny little props just a few this time so i need to create the three sculptures of airbenders that are on the bottom of the cliff what beauty why i needed a template to do that i don't know airbender or nuka-cola bottle only time will tell these are quite small they just lay in there like a really low stakes version of operations using sculpey and doing my best that could probably describe a lot of my sculpting just like scraping away at them with different tools why why did i just make it look like an alien just click away now just unsubscribe let me struggle for a little bit there is a tree on one of the tiers of the biggest temple made the tree trunk so i just created the form as best as i could and started carving the bark texture into that a really small version of oppa but um i'm running into a small issue he's kind of a different size in every single shot as big as i feel is right i guess kind of platypus-esque a little bit like the cat bus listen i love you oppa but you are not easy to sculpt at a small scale or maybe i'm just really bad at sculpting maybe it's a combo of both i think the hardest part was getting all the proportions right and i probably still didn't in the end i was like okay i'm going to make another smaller oppa and it's the same size maybe it's just meant to be that size baked all of those and got to painting them the sculptures i just tried to create that stone color just adding on highlights and shadows trying to make them kind of a little bit aged and worn down or using a lot of very natural colors then i went ahead and painted my little sky bison just doing my best here painting on the arrows and all the little details of his fur his feet the horns everything and painted the tree trunk added in some highlights and attached some of the reindeer moss to create the actual top of the tree and then everything was ready to be assembled [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so here is the western air temple [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that's it i keep saying that i'm going to do smaller projects and then i don't and it takes me forever to finish these large projects hopefully i do something a little bit simpler next time that being said i really can't say enough just how important this series has been in my life really the only thing i hope is that it did it some kind of justice because i respect and love the series so so so much i could literally have an entire channel dedicated to avatar projects i just had some heavy duty velcro laying around it says that it can hold up to 10 pounds and this is very light hope that goes well and it doesn't fall anytime soon tell me your favorite avatar episode tell me your favorite character even though i'm sure a lot of you will say iro it's okay i understand tell me what kind of bender you would be i would be an airbender not that that's probably much of a surprise if you make something like this or you've made something from avatar perhaps in the past i would absolutely love to see it please send it to me [Music]

Channel: MechanicalFiend

Views: 44,798

Keywords: MechanicalFiend, miniature, craft, diorama

Id: dox6Gu7IRxk

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021