Dungeon doors

So with a-level results day done for another year (one of my department's most successful too), I've been able to come home to an empty house and have a bit of time to finish up some painting and take some documenting photos and a few show-off ones too. Over the last few posts on my dungeon project, I've been referring to a range of manufacturers models that I've used; for example Grendel Scotia for their scenery, Dark Arts Studios for their treasure chests and Milton-Bradley for their original Heroquest furniture. Today it's the turn of Mantic and their relatively new dungeon doors which I picked up recently from eBay (after some poor attempts at scratchbuilding). You can see that I've added a magnetic strip to the bottom of the doors so I can incorporate them to my modular dungeon tiles:

They are really nice simple sculpts and you can see you get two of each door design. I decided to add some detail from my bitz bix  on some of these, that may help add an extra narrative later to my games:

"..at the end of the dank corridor you see a small, aging door with a white cross painted crudely over the bare wood. If you wish to open the door turn to page 231, if you would like to blow your bone whistle, turn to page 94 or if you have spoken to the hunchback,  turn to the appropriate page  number".

I've been rereading some of the dungeon based Fighting Fantasy novels - Creature of Havoc, Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial of Champions - actually in numerical sequence from 1-300, just to pick up some nice detail from the written word as much as the illustrations to add to my dungeon oeuvre. I've written a whole list of ideas that i can add to my walls, future doors etc and I've also noted down all of the monster encounters with this vague idea of collecting, painting and gaming with some sort of combo of 3rd Ediion Warhammer, Frostgrave, Heroquest and Fihhting Fantasy stats. More on this in a seperate post. Needless to say that my copy of Out of the Pit has resurfaced to be left in different spots around the house as I pick it up and put it down.

So back to the doors. These were painted very quickly. A quick tidy up of some small mold lines. Primed grey (the actual pieces come on a brown plastic) and then black washes on the stone. When this is dry I drybrushed some lighter greys over the top with the lightest colour (almost white) applied to the corner edges of each stone. For the wood I used a combination of lots of different washes from chestnut ink for the redder doors, to sepia, Browns and greens for the other colours. I usually apply the washes after highlighting, but I decided to work the other way around, and it was actually much easier.. So after the washes on the wood were dry and then chose the appropriate wash colour, mixed in some white and painted on no more than three accessibly lighter lines that followed the grain of the wood. Done. Details that I added from my Bitzbox and that were already on the doors, like hinges etc needed a bit of time (I always curse my previous self for going over the top on adding extras when my current self has to paint the bastards) and then some wearhering washes using the same colours as on the doors were applied over the stone. Not including drying times, I reckon each door took 20minutes tops.

I will return to my scratchbuilt attempts of doors, but I need to move on to some other manufacturers stuff to add to my stuff....