Dark Age Cottage finished !

After an enjoyable saturday with a great game of Saga (AAR will follow soon) I found some time on sunday to sit down at the painting table and work a bit on my Dark Ages cottage. For some time I had both unexpected and appreciated help:

Viktoria will turn 4 this August and seeing me at the painting desk has been fascinating for her since her youngest days. She always wants to "help" me or paint some figures on her own and with some old remains of my lead mountain I let her do as she wants. Anyway she helped me with some terrain pieces already and spread sand on them or easy tasks like this. But this weekend we took the gloves off. First I let her slather the teddy fur for the roof of the cottage with white glue and on sunday she helped my to put a dark brown whash (Armypainter Strong Tone) on the coloured fur. Of course I'm still carefull which tasks to grant her but this weekend our joint work went really good.

So only a few finishing touches for me to do. Actually I stuck to Mirco's excellent painting tutorial for the Dark Age barn, at least as close as possible. Teddy fur was a completely new material for me so this it has been an interesting experience to work with this stuff. Actually it is much easier to use than I thought.

Besides this I didn't use anything too special: As always the reliable paints from Vallejo's Model Colour range, some Armypainter washes, pigments, my homemade terrain colour and different grass tufts, moss patches, some clump foliage and some static grass.

Really I like the result of my humble work. But that's mostly due to the excellence of the kit. The parts were well cast, needed only little cleaning and fitted very well. Actually there was no need to fill any gaps or to correct warped pieces. The resin was excellent to paint which can sometime be a problem.

All things considered the kit is really worth the 36€ Stronghold Terrain is charging for it. For value you get a great kit which is not only technically done well but historically accurate. Remarkably Mirco and Elmar sculpt their models strictly after examples they found reconstructed in open air museums. So I will gladly build up my Dark Ages village with some of their nice houses. Next on my workbench is the pit house which I bought earlier this year. My charming apprentice and I already started...