HowTo: Building a tower - Part 4

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. I thought a while about the roof I want to build for my tower: Just a flat one with battlements or a pointy one with roofy shingles? Since I already invested so much time I decided to make the pointy one. So start the video and read the rest of this article :)

Building the roof

First I built a little paper cone as foundation for the roof. For this I cut out a small circle and tried around until I was happy with the angle and the overall size of it. Then I transfered the complete thing on cardboard and cut out everything. To fix this I used paperclips because glue needed too much time to make a stable bond. After that I drawed a second circle on cardboard (I recomend a pair of dividers for this) with smaller getting circles (can't describe this step very good). This will give you later the shingles, therefore the circles should have the right width.
After some cursing and some paper and cutting work the roof was finished:

Plain roof with shingles, all made out of cardboard

After everything was dry, I used some of the popsickle sticks from the last part and glued them beneath my cardboard circles. I thought of making a small wooden structure on the bottom of the roof but more of this later...

Painting the roof

Prime everything black and make a strong drybrush in lighter gray tones. Since I didn't like the gray roof in the end (Hey, I already have a gray tower!) I decided to make some glazing and mixed my own turqoise glaze of Vallejo GC72024 (Halcon Milenario Turquoise). With this really thin paint I brushed the roof to give it a blueish tint:

Painted and glazed roof

I think this worked pretty well, all of the really bright, gray shingles turned into blueish shingles, which look much better then the gray variant. After the glaze dried for some minutes (I think I waited approx. half an hour) it was ready for the next part.

Putting everything together

Ok, now its just glueing everything together I thought (remember the popsickel sticks)... But this would be too easy. After I glued everything together and waited some hours for the glue to harden and then took the tower to control everything. Rrrrriiiitsch and the roof fell off.

And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ.

I built a framework inside the roof out of styrodur with some toothpicks I fixed everything and glued the whole piece together. After another 24 hours everything held together and you will need brute force to get this thing off again!

The finished tower including base, upper level and roof

In the end everything fits together pretty good. Perhaps I will to some detailwork, e.g. a rainwater downpipe and some ivy, but at the moment this is good enough.

Tower done, base to come. I' experimenting at the moment with some different things, perhaps you have already seen the results of my last forest expedition and get an idea what I will try...

Hope you enjoyed this article.


So long,
Paradox0n


P.S: As with my gaming board series I attach the links to all parts of the HowTo: Build a tower series on each part if you missed one:
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 1
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 2
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 3
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 4