The Abandoned Gatehouse

It's been ages since I painted anything for this project and when my lovely wife bought me a Lemax Halloween Gatehouse for my birthday, I knew I had to make this top of my list of things to rework into a wargaming model (you know, so I can still be entitled to get toys from her in the future). 

As with most Lemax buildings, this had great potential but needed a little TLC to bring it up to the standards and to remove some of the out of scale bits that tend to feature on them. I'll go into that a bit more below, but first the pictures of the finished gatehouse, which I tried to paint in order to match my earlier buildings in this project.

Some Empire dwarfs are exploring the abandoned gatehouse. Looks like it hasn't been visited in a long while and small scavengers abound, but then who lit those torches? Figures added for scale.

The gatehouse from different angles without figures:

Since it's been so long ago, some of the buildings this was painted to match:

And a comparison between the original model and the modified and repainted one below. I removed the oversized gravestones and skeletons. I did leave one of the skeletons under the arch as it was about the right size. I also got rid of the lighting system, since it couldn't be hidden. I used some plastic bits from a Warhammer fortified mansion to cover the large whole on the side where the switch box was situated. I should have removed the torches as well, since they're a bit big and there are big gobs of hot glue attaching them to the wall, but I didn't want to lose too many of the original building's features, so I kept them on. The building also has moulded on bits of green slime oozing in places. As I didn't quite see how to make that work, I decided to flock them and turn them into overgrown bits. I also used that in a few spots to hide some of the mouldlines that couldn't be removed, the lower body of the model being a type of porcelain.