maiji: Baby's first bamboo fence (wip, not to scale)

[Images: 1) Photo of a real-life long bamboo fence. 2) Photo of craft desk with a sheet of plastic on top. Resting on the plastic are lots of chopstick cuts wrapped with washi tape, plus an array of other random craft objects on top (pieces of chipboard, paper, a ruler, a bone folder, an eraser, tape, etc.)] After finishing three seasons of Best in Miniature (such a good show, I recommend it if you love tiny things and amazing craftsmanship and storytelling), and watching skilled artisans often recycle stuff to make awesome things, I've been inspired to attempt to not only continue drawing my retreat design but also make something physical too! I have an old plastic display box, and I thought it would be fun to try to make a mini meditation area in it! The box should be able to hold a little scene about 3x3x3". My main rules here are to not buy anything and only use stuff I have around the house, and of course to just enjoy it. We have a lot of takeout chopsticks (since restaurants often throw them in even if you tell them in advance you don't need it... prepackaging and/or automatic reflex I suppose), so I thought it would be lovely to have a background that is a little bamboo wall inspired by this fence I saw at Hokokuji in Kamakura. I don't expect it to look anywhere near as good/realistic as the photos, haha. Just vaguely reminiscent of it if possible.After doing some tests with fountain pen ink and some chopstick stubs, so far I have:1) Cut chopsticks to 3" x 16 pieces. I'll need to cut 3 more pieces after for the crossbar parts but I'll doublecheck the length of those after I assemble the main fence.2) Marked the bamboo segments in pencil, then went over it with a black ballpoint. I've doodled with ballpoint on wood before so it's fiiiiine.3) Cut washi tape into 1-2mm wide segments and wrapped them around the black ballpoint lines. The goal with this is to protect a slight sliver of original light wood above and below the black lines to get a little bit of the effect that you can see in the reference photos of the bamboo segments. This is super not the most efficient thing in the world (and I probably wouldn't do this if I had paint other than watercolour and fountain pen ink), but it's nice meditative practice.[Photo closeup showing the detail of the real bamboo fence, with assorted dark weathered surface patina ranging from greys and taupes to a deep brown. Each segment of bamboo has a ring of light wood, a dark ring delineating where the two segments end and connect with each other, and then another ring of light wood.]4) Stained the chopsticks with fountain pen ink by brushing them on. I used: Pilot Iroshizuku Fuyushogun and Kirisame; Papier Plume Sepia; Kyo no Oto Ochiguriiro; KWZ Confederation Brown; J. Herbin Cacao du Bresil. In my experiments, I had also tried staining by adding a few drops of ink to an old bottle and rolling the stubs around in them, but this stained the wood too deeply and obliterated the ability of the washi tape to block off any sections of wood. Might still be a good approach for some other application that needs the thorough coverage though![Photos of fountain pen staining tests. First photo shows a glass bottle with some dark ink next to a sheet of paper with three chopstock stubs previously soaked in ink and now resting to dry. Second photo shows a row of chopstick stubs with different coloured and attempts at creating a segmented bamboo effect next to a tweezer for scale.]5) Once it's dried, unwrapped the washi tape, then doing two coats at least two coats of white glue (bookbinder's glue in this case) and water.I'm still in the middle of coating the rest of the sticks. We shall see how this looks after everything dries and I have time to assemble them! Fingers crossed!