The Tower of the Ruby Princess

My daughter Maja has been the final vote for a number of projects since before she was born.   The thoughts of her just months before she arrived convinced me to go into Gnome Wars. The simplicity of the system and her love of mice have made me immerse myself into both the comic and rpg versions of Mouse Guard.

Most importantly a three year old looks at their Daddy as a deity.  He can reach things no one else can. He can          fix things that no one else has a clue, and his Voice of God can stop her exaggerated hysterics, and a follow-up squeezey bear hug can make even the most determined tears cease.

So when my little girl picks up one of my fourth tier projects in the garage and asks me to paint it to her specs, I'll be damned before I tell her no, especially when it involves picking up a paint brush for the first time in months.

U The item in question was a castle birdhouse sold through the Michael's craft stores.

Michael's has been, unfortunately, the closest thing to a hobby shop that I've had recently, and the quirky birdhouses are perfectG for 25-30mm figs and they are often on sale for well under five bucks.   The rocketship and church were better candidates for first birdhouse painted up for a wargame, but my little girl is the boss.

I sprayed over an old white undercoat with fresh black primer to avoid the need for a wash of some sort, and I immediately afterwards I ran into a snag. s

I had planned on using a similar technique to the one I used for my boats for Cold Wars: drybrushing using successively lighter colors to accent the stone. The problem was that I had ONE shade of grey amongst my entire collection of paints.  To counteract this, I

 1. Painted the entire tower Dark Midnight Blue (All paints will be Americana for this project).

 2.  Then heavily drybrushed it using Slate Grey.  More problems arose as that lone bottle had dried up and had to be reconstituted.  Reconstitution seems to take a day or some, I tried to draw paint from a spongy substance with every drop that I could gather.

 3. I then hit the stonework with a light drybrush of Titanium White, and painted the parapets with multiple coats of the same.

 4.  I then used three coats of Poodleskirt Pink on the parapets,  Evergreen for the base, and added a morbidly obese prince on the top.

5.  For the final touches, I added some static grass along all four sides, and bushes around the front entrance.

The birdhouse itself is a low-quality product.   There were numerous wooden slivers of the house coming off  during prep and the parapet, second level was a nuisance to paint a floor.

The final pic does allude to the projects I'm working on for May/June. The GW wolves are quite prominent, but if  you look to the far right, there is something literally burning a hole through my mind. I plan on 14 stands of figs marching across the board. It shall be glorious.