All Along the Watchtower: Part 3 of 3

OK!  Back to the watchtower.  We need to create a way to get in, so we turn to our trusted baked white sculpey.  I cut a piece to shape, and set down to carving in the texture!

I drew out my pattern of stones and wood planks...

And then starting carving out the texture with a variety of carving tools (you can see a few of these in the image).  I mostly use wood carving tools, but I will also use a scribe tool that works on plastic.

You can see the wood panels carved, and the surrounding stones as well.  To get the deeper textures, you need to really carve these pretty aggressively.  Don't be too bummed if the white sculpey cracks along the way.  You can always glue it back together!

The textures are fully carved.

The door is glued to the foam, using wood glue.  If you use super glue, you will melt your pink foam!

Once the door was set, I took a few pieces of the cereal box to make some metal bars to hold the wood planks together.  I also used some polystyrene tubing as hinges.

The door handle was created by gluing the rounded end of a paper clip to a piece of the cereal box.  We have thousands of those rounded paper clip ends all over the house, it seems, since that is what we use to pin out miniatures!  Cathy always finds them with her bare feet in the summer, which she enjoys very much!

Here's a slightly better view of that door handle.

I made a few windows in the same manner as the corner pieces on the walls, alternating the bigger and smaller pieces.

I used some oxide paste to cover some of the gaps in the corners where the pieces of cereal box don't quite line up.  That's why I was not so careful about that process.  I knew I wanted to use the flex paste, as it would not only close those gaps, but make a nice texture as well.

I covered a bunch of other gaps with the flex paste, and made some texture here and there where I thought it would be needed.

I brought out the sand and gravel to make the rock part of the base a little more realistic, and fill in the gaps between the base of the tower and the rocks.

With the rocks and gravel complete, we have a tower that is waiting for paint!!!

Stay tuned for that in a few days!