Stone bench and more

This photo is of the ryokan before I started working on it this morning. It's starting to look so much better the more I do on the landscaping!

This morning I worked on the retaining walls some more, and started adding little stones to the onsen. I think they will look nice around it.

I also built a little stone bench by cutting a small piece of basswood into a curved shape, using an X-Acto knife and some little files. I covered this with granite (either Fimo or Sculpey, I can't remember which), clay. The legs are little elongated balls I made with the same clay. The legs were attached using silicone glue. I'll attach some "moss" tomorrow, when the glue has dried.

I was going to use the stone lantern near the bench, but as you can see from the photo, the lantern looks huge compared to those trees, so I'll use it somewhere else.

There is an eBay seller who makes beautiful resin "stone" lanterns, but the smallest size he has listed right now are the 4" ones. I contacted him to see if he was going to make any more 2" ones. Those would be more in scale with this house. He has some lanterns which aren't the tall ones, and I think one of those would look better because the trees are so small.

It's really difficult landscaping this house, because it is very tall, and there isn't much room around it for the landscaping, so most of what is outside, isn't really 1/20th scale. So far, everyone who see it thinks it looks fine, even though it isn't really true to scale.

This photo shows the bench better, and under the trees, you can sort of see some ferns I made using a McGill fern punch. I'm not sure how they look under there yet, there isn't enough room to really see the side of the house, and it's difficult to arrange anything on either side at the back. I love the size of this house, but it really is huge!