A bear's home is his castle

Well, I have really gone 3D this time!  I started with the Pixie Dust Studio's DT challenge image, Wink the bear, whom as was said on the site was getting his castle ready.  This bear needed a home!  As it was St Georges Day when I started on this card, I had dragons and castles in mind so a castle was definitely on the cards (pardon the pun!).  As is usual, I come up with these ideas, inspiration runs away with me and I then put my mind to working out how on earth I can put my plans into reality.

Firstly I coloured the image in browns for the bear's fur, then reds for the robes as bearfitting (sorry!) a bear of royal blood.  I then drew some rolling English hills and topped the most distant one with a castle, flags flying at full mast as their King is home!  I then cut the image with my circle cutter and made a frame out of grey textured card and drew on the brickwork.  To add a bit more depth I cut out part of a circle, cut a flat side to it and made it into a crenellated balcony for our King to stand on.  Now I needed to build a castle structure to home King Bear.  Really must learn to think these things through before I come up with smart ideas!

I took another piece of grey card and measured out where the crenellations of the castle ramparts would lie, and cut them so they sloped down the card, adding a very strange sense of perspective to the card structure once assembled.  I added brickwork onto the card so that as it stands up, you can see brickwork like you would see on the inside of a square tower if that makes sense?  I added a cardboard hinge to attach the front image onto the castle and made a latch to secure the image on the other side of the castle 'tower' so it all stands up.  I think it works, lol.  I had to take the photograph from a strange angle to try and show the detail on the front and the castle structure, hope you can see it truly is a 3D card and can probably just about make out the latch on the lefthand side which holds the whole thing together. :-)