In this second part of Building a High Elf Mansion, Mike Radcliffe explains how to paint his completed building...

Now that the construction of the building was finished, I got to start on the painting! I first gave the whole building a coat of textured paint, then I painted all the walls with some Bubonic Brown. They were finally drybrushed Bleached Bone to give them a light stone look. For the roofs, I started with a nice coat of Enchanted Blue to keep with the High Elf motif and finished them off with a light drybrush of Lightning Blue and more with a little white mixed in.

The doors were all given a wash of Chestnut and Brown Inks, then a drybrush of Bestial Brown. All of the metal bits, like the balcony railing, door rings and pennant poles, I gave a basecoat of Chaos Black, since metal always looks best when it’s painted over black. Then the silver metal parts received a nice drybrush of Chainmail. You could even highlight further with a little bit of Mithril Silver mixed in. The gold metal was first painted Shining Gold, followed by a wash of Chestnut Ink and, finally, a drybrush of Shining Gold mixed with Mithril Silver.

The most detailed parts of the building, I think, are the statue alcoves on each side. The marbling effect was covered a while back in my article titled, 'Chapel of Blood,' where I built a Blood Dragon chapel for the Vampire Counts (White Dwarf #256). Of course, this time I used Shadow and Fortress Grey instead of reds. Making the figures appear like they were made of stone, as well, utilized the same colours. These were just drybrushed on rather roughly.

If you’re stuck on which models to put in the alcoves as your statues, just let yourself go nuts. Heroes and character models are always good, if you’re going for a more regal feel to the building, but regular spearmen and other troops are good, too. Whatever you want to use to accent the building’s overall theme is perfectly fine. Even some cool monster types could be nice, if you feel so inclined.

After adding a couple of old Silver Helm banners I got from Mail Order I was done! Here’s the High Elf Mansion in all it's glory. Now that it was finished, I sat it down on the table to admire it. Of course, it would need a really cool watchtower to accompany it. And if I had a really cool watchtower, a monolith would complete the whole Tears of Isha set. There’s a really nice High Elven monolith piece from Forge World that would go really well. Then I would be able to repel those smarmy “Look at my new Cold Ones” Dark Elf players from the land of Chill with style. Of course, there is also the small matter of completing an entirely painted High Elf army... oh, well.