Hall-ing Away

Remember the castle's  Great Hall?  You probably don't it's been so very long since I've worked on it.  You see, all that floor space made great storage for lights and other unattached bits of the castle.  It has nothing what so ever to do with the fact I couldn't decide what colours to use and was not looking forward to painting the floor.  Absolutely nothing.  Whatever the cause of it's long neglect, it was time to put some serious effort into the Hall before it fell even further behind the rest of the castle.  The floor had already been tiled with air dry clay so the first task was to paint this.  After a couple of coats of white I spent an whole afternoon carefully painting every other tile in "oakmoss" green to create the checkerboard effect.  When I was happy that all the edges were straight, I added a coat of matte sealer.

 The upper walls had already been papered with a beige and white fabric, so all that remained was to make the panelling for the bottom part of the walls.  The  panelling is cardboard painted oakmoss green to match the floor trimmed with balsa wood strips painted white.  The main feature of the room is the fireplace/doorway unit.  This was made outside the castle from yet more balsa and cardboard and decorated with more of the wall fabric and some plaster frieze from Sue Cook Miniatures.  The firesurround is also a Sue Cook, though I picked it up on ebay some time ago.  The curtains that act as doors were from the original castle but tone in well with the new colour scheme.  The doors don't look so great without the curtains though:

 I will either try painting the illusion of another room in these spaces or print out photos of some of my other castles to act as backdrops.  Personally, I am totally in love with the green and white colour scheme in here and think it will be a great pity to add wooden furniture or even people in colourful clothes.  The one thing that currently isn't working for me is the Gallery above the Hall.  The deep colours up there make the Hall/Gallery combination look very top heavy.  I'm hoping that a white railing will even things out because I really want to keep the tudor frieze on the walls, even if the colours are now totally wrong for the castle.

 I also spent a little time working on fireplaces for the bedroom and solar.  The less said about these the better.  The bedroom fireplace is all right, but the colour is very, very wrong.

I'm not sure whether the colour looks so wrong because it is against bare white walls and will look better with furniture, wall hangings (etc) in the room or whether to just repaint now.

Meanwhile the Solar fireplace is way too close to the top of the stairs, but moving it messes up the panelling!

Do I keep them or change them?

In other news, this blog has reached 140 followers!  Although I have ceased to individually welcome each new follower, I am always thrilled to see my number of followers has increased and so glad that each of you wants to follow me.  For those of you who may be reading this who aren't following yet, there will be another giveaway when I reach 150 followers . . . .