So I have Skelfthyrnir, a big purple deer skull-headed fellow who, in my setting, is a forest god and lord of the Hartwood. Because of this, I've been thinking about giving him a throne since I started building him. The hard part has been finding something right. I looked at grapevine and bent willow chairs, with thoughts of modifying them with floral bits to make them look more woodsy, but all of them seemed too short for his legs. I found a neat little chair at Michaels, but it's too classically chair and wouldn't look right as a base.

So I started thinking in terms of making use of stuff I already had on hand to make a more customized chair. Enter: foamboard and an empty kleenex box.


Upon these dead trees we shall build our...other dead tree.

I googled 'forest king throne' and used the results as inspiration, and started drawing out the outline of a broken, dead tree to serve as the throne's back. I wanted something that would look impressive behind Skelf's rack and give me a good place to attach some floral-sized faux antlers I was sent.


Was the look of the Iron Throne rising behind up everybody also an influence? ...yeah.

The next step: assembling it into something vaguely chair-shaped. I used dolls to figure out the rough height for the backing against the kleenex box, finding the box itself provided a base of a nice height without any modifications to it. I did stick a support beam inside it, though. More foamboard got glued on, both to try and strengthen the seat and to make the front look less perfect.

After adding on some arms made of more foamcore (because it just looked off without them), it was time to make it something vaguely approximating a tree. I used white glue and paper towels to layer over part of the front, to cover up the big gaps and make a better surface for adding paint and faux plants. The back, meanwhile, got a mixture of model magic and hot glue layered on, to try and get the look of bark. The lowest areas were left blank, because my end plan was to use faux plants to make it look more naturalistic on whatever I set it down on for photos, and the idea of adding lights was tempting (thus the holes punched in towards the top.)

I gave it about a day to let the model magic dry and to let the whole thing stop reeking of white glue, then hit it with a coat of gesso. This initial coat did nice job of being sort of a test coat, showing how the painting and plants should disguise materials use and make it look like old bark. The actual results weren't translucent, but it was a good check to make sure I was going in a quasi-right direction.


Totally a tree and not a pile of paper and glue.

After throwing on a second coat of gesso, the whole thing was a solid black, to try and give it the best painting surface possible (and to possibly help seal that hot glue from any heat-related mishaps.) The initial painting was done in shades of brown, grey, and white, giving a very light base color:

The following day, it was time to try and use a wash to blend everything into something more cohesive. I mixed water with black and brown airbrush paint, and applied it with the sort of wide, flat brush you'd use for putting stain on a table. This worked out well for getting a much more weathered wood look and blending the colors together, creating something closer to the worn and dead tree look I was wanting.

To Be Continued - Prop in Progress!