Last year, while perusing the wood bits at Michaels, my husband saw some unfinished birdhouses that he thought would be fun to add themed dragons to. There were a few different styles in the size we were looking at, but we picked out a little barn and a little tower looking birdhouse.
I thought it would be fun to do something farm animal related for the barn birdhouse, painting it in very traditional barn house red, bright white, and brown. Next week, you’ll see what I did with that one (I created it for a special project), today, I wanted to share what I did with the other birdhouse.
The tower
It took me a little longer to figure out what to do with this one, but somewhere along the way I thought of Rapunzel’s tower from Tangled. While I could have just painted the birdhouse as it was, I decided to bridge the gap between the current house and Rapunzel’s tower a little more by augmenting its shape and adding details.
I was pleased to find that the ropes for original houses were easy to remove (the ones intended to turn these into hanging houses). I filled the hole with apoxie sculpt, and you would never be able to tell where it was!
Along with the closing up the hole, I created a slightly pointier roof and extended it so that it reached just beyond the walls of the house. I added a chimney as well. I knew I didn’t want to straight up sculpt every detail (not to mention, the tower has SO MUCH DETAIL and it was hard to absorb it all through reference photos), I just wanted to add a few more characteristics to suggest Rapunzel’s tower.
The characteristics I chose to add, outside of the changed roof and added chimney, included trim around the birdhouse opening and clusters of exposed brick around the exterior. All of these were sculpted with apoxie sculpt and added to the structure.
When it came time to paint everything, I chose a simplified palette of colors to again convey the idea of Rapunzel’s tower: a cream for the walls, a bluish-purple gray for the roof, brown for the chimney, base, and trim, and gray for the bricks.
The dragon
Now that the tower is done, it’s time to move on to the dragon! I will be making her similarly to my previous Rapunzel dragon from a few years ago, but more refined.
I also decided to add Pascal at the last minute for a fun detail.
And here is the finished set!
I’m holding onto this piece as it will be on display and for sale at the Moscow Artwalk in June. I like to use the art walk as an opportunity to push some boundaries and do some creative exploration, and I thought this would be the perfect excuse to pick this project back up and finish it!