Black Magic Craft Tower

Published 21 April 2021

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This is heavily inspired by the modular mage tower build by Black Magic Craft.

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Draw the same shape over and over again on a large sheet of foam.

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Use a utility knife to cut those shapes out, and draw irregular stone patterns on the sides.

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Glue them all on top of each other at an angle to make create a stair effect.

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Once stacked, and with a stone pattern drawn on it. I wasn't really sure what to draw on the top floor, so I went with a star pattern with alternating stone size.

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The usual mix of black paint and mod podge to both seal and act as a basecoat.

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Grey overbrush on the stone, and tried another stone color on top.

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I painted a few stones in different colors to break the monotony, but they came out a lot lighter than expected and I was afraid it would look too distracting.

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I applied a black wash on the grey stones, and it toned it down enough for my taste. I then started painting the top stones in various colors that I thought would go well together (dark red, brown and tan) but it just made the whole piece look like a giant chocolate cake.

Well, this was a fun build and pretty easy to do. I should have applied the stone texture (through the ball of aluminium foil) before glueing the pieces together, though.

After I finished the build I decided that I should made a few others, so I could stack them to build a really high tower. I also decided that I should add a custom top level on each side, allowing more more versatility on what the last floor would look like.

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I took inspiration from the winds of magic of the Warhammer world, and decided to build one tower top for each wind.

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I created two more towers.

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The same but face down (or up, or whatever).

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Some closeup of the hand drawn runess

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Here it is, after the first coat of paint.

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And the view from the other side

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I tried drybrushing some brown and green here and there to give it a rough and used look.

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The final effect is ok, but I think I might have had to add some color variety to the stones before doing all this colorful drybrushes.

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I tried again on the next part, again with the green and brown on top of gray stone.

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And first layer of colored paint on top. The stone pattern on the top floor was done using a GreenStuffWorld roller I just received and wanted to test.

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For this one, I went all gold on the top.

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The purple wind. I tried some kind of light aura effect around the rune.

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I don't really know what I did there, but it was a mistake. I think I tried to apply a red wash, or a red drybrush, but it just ruined the initial effect that was so much better.

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Finally, it was time to paint the runes and apply a wash on the tops. This took quite some time as I had to first wait for the rune paint to dry before applying the wash (I'm using cheap craft paints, and if I try applying a wash before it's completely dry, it just removes the paint). Also, because the surfaces to paint are on both sides, I had to wait for one face to be done before moving to the opposite face.

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With the other projects I was working on at that time.

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I had some issues while having them dry, I accidentally left a sheet of paper on top and the still wet wash adhered to the paper and ripped the paint off.

Unfortunately, I don't have a group picture of all the tower parts because I was putting them in boxes (I'll be moving to a new house soon) as they were finished.

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