Furniture What Matches: Part 1 of Far Too Many

Please forgive me in advance for the length of this description, but as this is the initial entry in (yet another) big project, it's somewhat necessary. Since I've finally finished up the "Totally Plastered" project and it's all posted over on LiveJournal, welcome to the project that's replacing it: The Great EAxis Wooden Furniture What Matches Project. (And no, that "What" is not a typo. Ask any redneck. )

My mission: To beat into submission a wide selection of EAxis's wood furniture, so that each piece is available in a uniform and realistic color palette with compatible grain patterning. Sounds simple...BUT IT ISN'T!

The end result: In theory, every piece of furniture that I recolor will be mix-and-matchable at least in terms of color and grain pattern. (Style is a whole 'nother story, of course.)

Mind you, I have NO intention of recoloring every single piece of EAxis's furniture...but I do intend to recolor a LOT of it, cherry-picking my way in no particular order through the base game and all EPs/SPs.

For furniture, I've selected 11 of the not-"weathered" colors from my wood palette to use, mostly because those are the ones that have a real-world wood stain color equivalent and so make realistic sense for furniture. Plus, I've added a "white," which is really a very light true gray that tends to look a bit distressed and that I call "Cottage White." (For those keeping score, its hex code is EAEAEA. *snicker*) It's meant to replace all three of the grays that I left out of this selection of colors, in that it will still go rather nicely with the gray wood floors and other Build Mode stuff I've made and am still working on uploading. Plus, "white" is just generally useful to have when all else fails. So, that's a total of 12 colors to spread across a very big board.

In addition to changing colors, in pretty much all cases I'm editing the original grain patterns of the pieces, if not completely re-graining them. EAxis has a tendency to use textures that are rather obviously drawn from photographs of finished wood. That often looks really nice on any given piece, but it tends to make one's life difficult when trying to use the same pattern on pieces of many different shapes and sizes...which I suspect is probably WHY a lot of EAxis's wood furniture doesn't match. I, on the other hand, tend to create grain patterns from scratch, and they are usually very simple. Simple is better because, ultimately, the simpler a grain pattern is, the more things you can slap it on without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears going into making it look right. So, my furniture textures might not be as photo-realistic as some of EAxis's...but they ARE more universal, so I can (relatively) painlessly make furniture that mixes and matches. However, if true photo-realism is your thing...look elsewhere.

So, all that "boilerplate" said... I started with dining sets because those are the pieces whose not-matchiness ticks me off the most. First up, I offer the base-game Luxuriary "Ample King" Dining Table. It's one of my favorites, but it's a case of "Love the table, hate all but one of EAxis's textures." For this upload here at MTS, I've paired it with the Contempo Penn Station Chair, even though it's really the Oaktowne Dining Chair that matches it. (At least in shape; the EAxis colors do not remotely match each other.) Please note that I HAVE recolored the Oaktowne chair and its seat...Boy, did I recolor the seat...but they won't be going up here. They're on my LiveJournal, though, in this entry, and if you go there you can find out why they aren't here and then you can download them if you decide that you can live with the reason why they won't be going up here.

But the Penn Station chair matches well enough for jazz, I think. It's also one of my favorite and most-used chairs, anyway, and not just as a dining chair. So here are the two pieces together in four of the 12 colors of the palette, with the other eight attached to save scrolling effort


You download the pieces separately, so if you want one but not the other...there you are. As usual with my stuff, the files are pre-Compressorized and clearly named so that you can easily get rid of the colors you don't want.

And with that, I'm done blabbering. Really. I promise. And I promise that future related posts won't have all the "boilerplate."