Dice Tower

I have a friend who I got to know at the D&D table.  They have always got me the most thoughtful gifts, I still use every one and I have always wanted to get them just as thoughtful a present but failed miserably with inspiration.

...Until I had the idea to create a dice tower in a box with a hand crafted set of dice to use at the table.

The insides were constructed with heavy duty card stock and measured the length and width to fit inside the box it will be kept in. The depth had to be deep enough to allow the die down the centre. After adding a couple of ledges out of bent card stock for the die to bounce off of on its way down, I painted everything black then glued the front cover on. Basic structure complete.

I cannot emphasise enough just how many times I test ran a die down here before i sealed it.

To form the walls I sliced some xps foam 3-4 mm thick, drew horizontal lines with a ruler and pencil then hand drew on the bricks rounding the edges because I wanted the look of the flint knapped walls of the 14 and 15C buildings where I am from.

Once the stonework façade was in place, held with some white PVA glue, I base coated grey dollar store acrylic paint mixed with Modpodge. From here I wanted a bit more distinction and tried a variety of different colours on individual bricks before dry brushing and then a black acrylic wash. Initially it looked like a grimy London Victorian terraced house so I kept trying and the final selection was a variety of shades of grey as I still wanted it to look like stone, although this wasn't to be realised until after a few more steps in the process.

It is one of those projects though that I look at and think it just isn't 'there' yet. For some reason I felt that a vine growing around the doorway would help. Using oven bake clay I cut out tiny leaves with a punch along with some flowers and made a stem as an anchor point. Once the clay had been baked at 130 degrees celsius for 15 minutes i set about painting the leaves green, flowers purple and centre of the flowers pink (her favourite colours include pink and purple).

I got to the corner of the tower with the climbing vine and still thought it was lacking so I cut some crenellations out of 3mm thick xps and stuck them to the top, having to base coat these is what led me to pain the tower all over grey again. once this was blackwashed it still looked a bit ...meh. The bland all over grey was mitigated with some differing shades of grey up to white, this was overbrushed and then washed with a black acrylic wash and I finally felt the colour was what I was aiming for. Until....I added some edge highlights in the direction of an overhead sun.

As you can see from the picture above I still wasn't happy with the composition so I found a few pictures of gargoyles from towers in the town where I am from and copied these in ovenbake clay, painting them grey and placing them on/by the crenellations.

Still not satisfied I decided a stained glass window would be great. It would have been so much better if i had decided at the beginning but ...

I had some imprinted coloured translucent plastic sheets from Shifting Lands. On a thin piece of xps I cut an arched window frame about 'yay' big. I really just held it against the tower until I had covered what seemed proportionate to my eye. The plastic was cut to fit behind it and glued to the frame which was achieved with PVA, after the edge of the plastic had been glued to some greaseproof paper. This was a necessary step because I had decided on the window so late in the construction process so it was being stuck over brick.

The window looked a bit plain on its own so I added some individual bricks to form a frame as well as a centre Y section to give some depth interest. Finally happy with this I added it to the tower but still not happy with the overall composition and not wanting to add so many features that it would look chaotic, I decided to build up the vine. This was also the stage where I added green moss in places and some golden leaves.

Finally i decided to call it done or I would have been adding to it for another year.