Working on my new Haunted Dollhouse

So months ago, I got this dollhouse at Goodwill for a buck.

I knew I wanted to do another haunted dollhouse (the first one I did is no longer w/ me-

 had to leave it behind when I moved) but I couldn't decide how I wanted it  to look.

I don't want it to be a hokey kind of haunted house with mummies and vampires, but I wanted it to look like an old abandoned house that is the subject of local lore. You know, the kind of creepy old house that kids dare each other to go into, and that everyone swears they know someone who's seen a face in the window.

I finally got the paint last night: I am going to use a crackle glaze, and gray acrylic over that. 

The house didn't have any of the trim or window frames with it, so I'll have to figure something out for that stuff.  I'm much better at doing the interiors of my dollhouses, so the exteriors are always a s̶t̶r̶u̶g̶g̶l̶e̶ challenge.

Now that the Halloween stuff has started appearing in some stores, I feel more inspired. Creepy dollhouses are always fun because of their muted horror. Most of the time they are pastel colored, with smiling dolls and interiors that we wouldn't mind living in ourselves, although those can be equally as horrifying if they are in certain contexts- like The Lovely Bones.

The Lovely Bones is an adult book, but let's not forget Betty Ren Wrght's classic The Dollhouse Murders, in which a family of dolls re-enact a brutal murder in order to solve a mystery that's plagued the family for decades.

As if dolls acting out a murder in a work of children's fiction isn't creepy enough for ya, how about the real-life dollhouses of Frances Glessner Lee, who built 1:12 scale dioramas of real crime scenes. They are used as training tools for forensic investigators.

Here's a site with more info on ol' Frances:

http://www.deathindiorama.com/

Although I've never recreated an actual crime in my own work, I did construct a roombox inspired by The Silence of the Lambs after a friend joked about the possibility.  . .I was pretty excited to find that tiny bottle of lotion (to place in the basket).