The set assembled

Once the set was assembled we all split off into various areas of focus to work on our individual projects. As a group we had each been assigned a building task on which to concerntrate, mine as mentioned before was building the floor.

As John arch and myself had worked closely in our designs and John had the task of creating the look for the walls it seemed fitting that we help each other through the two projects and as such teamed up concerntrating particularly on the walls of Gregor's room.

Although John did the vast majority of the work on the walls I helped with design ideas to start with and later with construction.

We were both very interested in the distressing technique used in the Silent Hill movie and as such wanted to implement a variation of it in our set, so Our first task was to Paint the walls a very dark brown and black with flecks of paint in greens, yellows and lighter browns. Henry explained to us that the wallpaper would not hold to this very well which may cause us problems but we told him that we did not really want the wallpaper to fix well as we were going to destroy the majority of it. I do not think he really approved of the idea but was very patient and gave us advice on distressing wallpaper that I will get to later.

Once the paint had dried John put up the wallpaper at which point herny explained how our job of destroying the wallpaper would be easier if we soaked it with water as this would help it not only come off easier but also shred more convincingly.
 We followed his advice and soaked the walls in water that we applied with rollers.

With this done John and me started to destroy the wallpaper using stanley blades and wire brushes to creat slash and wear marks and in areas where we could get a good grip used our hand to tear strips down and leave them hanging.
This took a very long time but the end result was quite effective. However it was still lacking a convinceing three dimensional distressed look.

John came up with the idea of staining the wallpaer that remained with water diluted paints to give the effect of fluids running down the wall and to age and break it up a bit.

The above picture shows the result of our distressing and painting. Quite a state!

Our course tutor Simon suggested speckling paint on with a sponge to get a more naturalistic look so we did this and it helped the overall look of the piece.