I’ve finally reached the point on the Victorianna where I can glue on the front roof pieces. Yay, progress!

My plan was to add fishscale shingles to the top portions of the towers. I got these from Alpha Stamps.

I don’t know why, but even though it looked great in my head, I hated this once I saw it. The scale of the shingles is fine but they seem too big and chunky somehow — more like a dragon’s back than a pretty Victorian detail. I let it sit like that overnight just in case I changed my mind, but the next day I still hated it. Luckily the chipboard shingles were easy to rip off!

On to Plan B (which didn’t exist yet). I hadn’t prepared the plywood with the intention of having it show, so the towers needed to be covered up with something. Adding siding seemed like a pain because of all the seams — I’ve never been very good at cutting straight edges on clapboard siding, and the siding I have on hand is brittle and splits easily. I knew it wouldn’t look good.

The beadboard I used inside on the bathroom wall was easier to work with, but when I held it up against the tower wall the grooves seemed way too small.

So I ended up buying some 1/4″ board and batten siding from Miniatures.com. Since the grooves run vertically, the corners will be much easier to deal with than they would have been with clapboard siding — I’ll just butt the pieces up next to each other and fill in the seams with wood filler.

Whenever possible I like to swap out the windows on a die-cut dollhouse with Houseworks windows, or at least make my own trim as I did on the tower’s bay windows, but that’s easier said than done when the window has a non-standard shape. I wasn’t excited about using the window trim that came with the kits. Compared to the bay windows underneath, the oval trim seems clunky and way out of scale.

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Continuing with the Victorianna’s “copper” tower roof — it doesn’t take long for pretty, orangey copper to tarnish and turn blue out in the elements, so I need to dirty it up.

To do so, I bought a set of Vintaj Patina paints. This set is appropriately called Weathered Copper and includes three colors: moss, vertigris, and jade. This stuff is meant to be used on metal but it’s just paint, no reason it can’t be used on wood. (Update in 2024: The original link to these paints stopped working so I removed it, but here’s a similar set that includes the three aging colors as well as antique copper.)

I started with the moss since it was the darkest and tamest of the three, using my favorite dry brush technique to splotch it on. (Dry brush technique: dab a stiff bristle brush in paint and then splotch most of the paint off on a paper towel before using it.) It didn’t look quite right, but I figured if I didn’t like how it turned out I could always repaint the roof copper and start over.

Next I splotched on some vertigris. Yikes, that’s bright.

And finally the jade. This is definitely not the look I’m going for. Back to the drawing board painting table.

For my second attempt I used a sponge brush and applied the paint more liberally. Here it is with a coat of moss.

Followed by vertigris (just one panel in this photo, to give you an idea of how the vertigris changes the overall color).

And finally the jade. This looks better than the last attempt, and is reminiscent of a tarnished copper roof. But I want my roof to be mostly copper with a hint of oxidation, not the other way around.

Using a dry brush again, I re-applied the copper paint. This process reminded me of the eraser tool in a program like Photoshop — splotching on the copper paint effectively “erases” the other colors until only a hint remains.

Here’s how it turned out. I might play with it some more when I do the other tower roof.

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