Preparing for Dunjon of Death II :: The Doors

VISIT part I

Overview

I've been working on my doors.

The idea is that I'll have modular dungeon tiles with connectors at the center of each edge. These connectors are a standard width of 7CM, and so each door is removable and based upon a 7CM-wide element. The doors are from CMON and from Mantic.

The Construction

I've got a bunch of pictures with some captions detailing my observations. Altogether I have 44 doors. If the average dungeon tile has about 3 doors for connectors and internal rooms, then this is 15 tiles or a 5 by 3 dungeon crawl. I think that is good enough for a demo game at a convention but more than necessary for scenario-based campaign play which I think will be no more than 9 tiles and average about 6.

This is where we left off; I added a primer coat to all of my door assets.

Some of the square door assets I cannibalized with the intent of making double-doors; I've got four of those now. Also, one copy of each of the Mantic doors I mangled to show that they are doors which couldn't be opened ... for variety.

Here's where I discover that my desire of having 5CM-tall walls is a problem! Most of the doors are either 4.5CM-tall or even taller.

Here's what I mean; the walls are too short for both of these door types.

For Mantic's double-wide doors, I'd need to have something at least 7CM tall. My work around for this is to glue a 2CM-tall block above each of the wall sections for the smaller doors to make the walls tall enough. For the very large CMON doors I'll need to cut some new foam.

Here's what the doors look like; too big! 

More of the same. I'll be adding a 2CM-tall block to the tops of these.

For the Mantic doors, my utility idea is to NOT GLUE them into the foam but to allow them to be swung open. This allows me to show open-close state for the doors.

Here is an example of a corrected wall tile for the taller CMON doors.  These particular doors (the CMON ones) I'll glue into the foam portals. I decided to also "stress" the portals on the doors. to give them more character.

My doors with their stressed deco. For each of these CMON doors, and the Mantic doors too; I'll need to cut our a base (I'll use Plastruct) and glue them to the foam.

All of my bases for the door connectors will be 7CM by 4CM.

Here's the plan.

CMON door closed with the portal.

CMON door open with the portal.

Everything glued and ready, awaiting dry time.

Painting the Connectors

This is my current technique; very experimental!

1. Mix PVC glue (Elmer's Glue) with black acrylic paint.
2. Apply generously.
3. Dry-brush medium gray upon the black. Start from the bottom of the connector going upwards. Leave a lot of black.
4. Dry-brush light gray from the top going downwards. Make sure the brush is very dry. I hit the doors as well.
5. Dry-brush white on the edges of the portals and from the tops of the connector.
6. Paint the doors afterwards. I'll have a variety of colors mostly browns and steel, but I'll probably add blue, red, green, etc. doors as well to help indicate special access points for Dunjon of Death.

Everything is coated with acrylic black mixed with PVC glue.

Apply medium/dark gray, but take care to leave lots of black. Draw from the base upwards.

Apply light gray; draw strokes from the top downwards.

Here's a bunch with the three coats (black, dark gray, light gray).

Edge the portals and the tops with white dry-brush.

Some more views of the connectors and portals. I dry-brushed the doors as well so that I'll need only do light washes of color for them. 

Here's some detail with faint color.

Another blue door set.

Blue and green doors. I added some black wash ink to fill in some of the crevices and make the details stand out more. I didn't do this for all doors.

Here's some bronze paint added to the inlay bars.The doors are essentially finished for now until I craft the dungeon tiles so that I can match their base flocking correctly.