Hey remember this thread?
Hate to get your hopes up regarding the inn, but work on that just went reeealll slow, due to work contantly interrupting things and my being tired all the time. I am mostly finished (about 80% there structurally - still need to put the roof on - and most of the detailing remains, but that's it). Anyway, for good or for ill, I have more time on my hands for the next little while and will be able to do more work. Pics of the inn will be posted eventually.
I'm posting NOW because I actually got so sick of working on the same building for so long that I actually stopped, changed gears, and built an entirely separate building in a saturday, plus some extra time over the past two weeks. This one's another country cottage, but it's much more weathered and tumbledown than my previous ones. I also made a well (there's gloss medium in the bottom for water, but obviously you can't see it in this shot).
The inn is a big learning experience for city buildings (of which I plan to make more). For the cottage, I finally broke down and started using vegetation, so that was my learning experience for this building.
One of the neater things I did as an experiment was to carefully glue in bristles in the 'thin' areas of the roof thatch to show how 'frayed' the roof was (if you look at real pictures of thatched roofs in really rough shape, they look like they're 'leaking' what looks like fresh hay (which is just the clean under-thatch coming out). It's hard to see in these crappy pics, but maybe you can catch it a bit.