Studio Minidragon - High Quality Painted Miniatures

In this first photo you can see my work area. I've got lots of light, my work surface is neat and organized, and everything I'll need is close by. having a clean work area really speeds up my painting and helps to maintain my sanity!!

The first thing I want to mention is in regards to the kit itself. Iain at Castle Kits provides very clear instructions and packs the pieces very carefully. There were no broken bits in my set. Another great thing is that Iain sends the entire caste from the molds – not just exactly what you need to complete the kit; this means that you'll be left with lots of interesting and useful bits to play around with later!

The Pylon Temple instructions have you build a number of sub-assemblies and then combine these to make the towers and other bits. The first photo shows a number of tower sub-assemblies and the beginnings of one the towers. This is pretty quick work, the pieces are easy to line up and the instructions are very clear.

In the next photo, I've completed significant parts of the towers and decorative cornices.

The third photo shows the temple basically complete. All that remains at this point is to glue the pieces down to the terrain board and to each other. One note at this point, I did have to do some minor filing and scraping to get the wall sections to attach properly to the tower sections; the original fit was too tight and I was afraid I'd break things if I tried to force them together.

In this shot you can also see some extra pieces that I put to use. The sphinx are from the Temple Entrance kit, the altar is made up of pieces left over from constructing the temple (and I've still got lots more extras to lay with!!).

With the temple built I turned to the base. I knew that I'd be attaching the whole thing to large base. The first step was to cut out a piece of masonite.

Next my kids helped me glue down sand.

The next step was to cut out some pieces of cardboard that would be big flagstones.

When all the glue was dry we got out our big craft brushes and slapped down some paint on the sand and pieces of cardboard.

Here you can see the final sand color. We decided the color you see the temple and flagstones painted in abover was too light so we mixed up a darker color and gave the flagstones a heavy wash.

We gave the flagstones a few drybrushes to add some detail and then started gluing on patches of grass, flock, and bushes in random spots.

We glued the pieces down (and together) and then added some more bushes to hide a couple gaps and the Pylon Temple was complete! I think it looks great and the kids are already speculating that it may make an appearance the next time we play some games!

There's a Warmachine figure here for scale, you can have a nice little fight in the courtyard if you are so inclined..

A shot from the side, you can see how nicely the walls attached to the towers once I did a little bit of filing.