I Made a Cozy Little Christmas Village

How's it going ?

Everyone ?

Welcome back to boy I hobby time .

This week , I decided to create a little Christmas village somewhere in America .

Inspired by this Norman Rockwell painting .

I was recently given this knife as a Christmas gift from a friend of mine who runs a channel called Nine Times .

This is the jerry rig everything knife in case you're unfamiliar .

The kit I started with was the church .

Each kit comes with the walls cut from thin sheet of wood and some finer details on sticker backed card stock .

The buildings themselves are not too difficult to assemble but adding all of the little details became quite time consuming , especially after doing 12 in a row .

I did have a lot of fun throwing the tiny details in place .

I especially love how the windows and doors look .

Multiple layers of that car's stock makes for a very realistic effect .

After completing the church , I felt confident that I'd be able to move faster now that I knew how the buildings went together .

But the church was definitely the simplest structure that I put together .

So my confidence was misplaced .

The second building was the wood depot which had the most windows and a little vestibule out front because all these kits are laser cut , the sides of all the pieces are slightly charred .

So after handling them for a few hours , you can expect your fingers to become nice and sooty .

After completing the little house with the porch , I opened up this bag which came with three of the exact same kit .

So instead of assembling them like I did with the rest , I took a little shortcut after that was the barn and a country store .

And then I assembled the rest of the buildings off camera .

Once all the buildings were done , it was time to figure out the base .

I needed to lift it off the ground a little bit in order to hold all the electronics .

So I cut some strips of wood to the length of each side and I glued them in place .

After that , I decided on a layout for the town and I marked out where all of the holes needed to be for the led s under the houses .

I then drilled two little holes at each point to allow the negative and positive lead from my led s to pass through the board after I had dry , fit all of the led s into their positions .

I removed them and I took the base outside and I spray primed it white .

The reason I primed it white is because the snow mixture I'm using is slightly translucent and a white base color would be unnoticeable if it shows through .

It's also way easier to see all of the holes for the led s after the base was primed and all dry .

I took the buildings outside and I primed them as well .

I also primed all these little figures who I will be adding to the diorama .

Later , I then began painting all of the buildings with an airbrush .

I wanted to apply a more muted color scheme .

So I had this similar look and feel to Norman Rockwell's painting .

I painted the roofs of all of the buildings with the same color gray .

And then I went over everything with a dusting of white straight from the top so that if anything showed through , it would look a little bit frosty .

After cleaning up my hobby , Matt , I moved on to painting the details on the buildings which was mostly trim pieces , window frames and the doors after the buildings , I painted the people .

There's not much room for too much detail on these little people , but I still enjoy the process of painting people this size .

After all of the painting was done , it was time to move back over to the lighting .

I bought this special diffusing film from Woodland Phoenix , which will help create an even glow from the full window instead of seeing a single point of light from the inside , I measured and cut all of the pieces necessary to fill all of the windows in every building .

And then once those were in place , I moved back to the base to wire up all the lights .

I of course , needed a way to turn this thing on and off .

So I drilled a hole on the front of the box .

I ran a little toggle switch through the hole .

After that , I glued a battery housing in place .

I then connected the switch and the battery housing together and I ran a positive wire to each of the positive leads on the LEDs from the switch .

And I connected a negative wire from the battery housing to all of the negative leads , creating a parallel circuit .

When I went to test everything out , I discovered something a little bit unfortunate .

I thought it wasn't working .

But then I realized that I purchased the world's Dimmest LEDs , turn the lights off just to be sure that they were actually coming on .

I was pretty bummed that that didn't work , but it's always good to pivot and be able to problem solve .

I didn't want to have to use my led filaments for this even though they are nice and bright because it takes a long time for them to arrive from China and I am running out .

But the situation called for it .

So led filaments , it had to be instead of drilling new holes to run the filaments through .

I simply pulled up all of the old led si clipped off the lamps and I saw the filaments to the old leads and that saved me a ton of time .

When I tested my circuit again , I was very happy to see the familiar glow of those nice bright filaments .

After that , I was then able to glue all of the houses in place and it was time to create some snow .

I got out a little mixing pot as well as some soft snowflakes and a jar of mod podge .

I mixed up a concoction of about one part snow to one part mod podge till I had the consistency of frosting .

I then printed out over the whole surface of the base with a pallet knife and brought back memories of my oil painting days after the snow had set slightly .

I got out some hairpin fences to build a little graveyard next to the church .

I then of course filled my little n scale graveyard with little gravestones .

It was then time to mix up another batch of the snow and frost the roofs of all the buildings .

I added some little bits of snow to all of the window sills as well with a toothpick .

I gave the snow 24 hours to cure and then I began to add some trees .

I broke out some tiny evergreens from my collection of miniature foliage given to me by Diorama per I'll link their website below .

I trimmed the trees to a few different sizes I drilled some holes in the base and I glued all the trees in place .

I then went over the top with another layer of snow that I sprinkled on like powdered sugar .

And I stuck it all down with watered down glue and isopropyl alcohol .

After that , it was time to add some figures .

In addition to the figures I painted earlier , I also found this fun set of kids having a snowball fight .

It also included a little snowman , but we'll just pretend that he's Parson Brown .

The second to last thing to do was to glue all of the people in their positions .

And the last thing to do was to paint the sides of the diorama with black 3.0 .

After that , I called it good .

That is it for this video .

Thank you all so much for watching .

Hope you enjoyed huge .

Shout out as always to my patrons .

You guys are the best Merry Christmas .

Everyone .

Hope you have a Happy New Year .

I'll see you next time .