'Da Bar Yaga: UTDF26 Part One

Howdy! This is the first of four blog posts I’ll be making about my trip to Under the Dice Fest in Enfield, CT this October. I’ve been sweating it out in the miniature mines these last few months, so I’m thrilled to finally share what I’ve been working on! Thanks for sticking with me and I hope you enjoy <3

To get a better idea of the fest, check out my recap of last year, or check out the fest website. 

Wandering the many shores of the Pig Islands, ‘Da Bar Yaga offers good old fashioned home cooking to those in need. A large red barn atop two duck legs, ‘Da Bar Yaga waddles the waterlogged marshes and floats down the lily-choked river ways. Its destination? Those trapped in the dire pangs of hunger or within depths of sorrow. Staffed by a kitchen of invisible spirits, travelers who enter are treated to the flakiest fried perch, warm bowls of booyah, and a cup of coffee (or pint of cold beer depending on their disposition). 

Other than the rare hangover from a thirsty patron, nobody has ever talked ill of the food or drink provided, and the ghostly cooks and cookees accept no payment. Worship of the traveling barn is forbidden by the Lakeman’s jealous god, so the only compensation left is a good scrubbing. As ‘Da Bar Yaga passes by Lakemen hives, it’s become tradition for a party to set out, climb the wooden sides, and scrub off the bird waste, parasites, flotsam, and whatever else has hitched a ride.

‘Da Bar Yaga has become known outside of the Pig Isles due to the chattiness of Dwarvish visitors, woven into various tall tales and ballads, like this:

This was my submission to the Rusted Demon competition at Under the Dice Fest 2026. I told myself I wouldn’t submit this year buuuuuuut I wanted to make a Baba Yaga house for The Living Lakes anyway, so why not show it off?

The Rusted Demon is more about creativity and modeling than technical expertise, so I wanted to focus on evocative details that expressed what this setting (and my art) was all about. Although my gangly duck house didn’t win (I’ll talk more about the winners in my larger event recap), I’m still proud of her.

Building 'Da Bar

This project started with the barn. I knew I wanted to create my version of the typical midwestern barn, a ubiquitous sight from the farmlands of Iowa to the valleys of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region.

Similar to the bird temple, I created a box of XPS foam, with two extra slats forming the roof. I covered the foam with a combo of Elmer's glue and black paint, then began the long task of snipping and fitting popsicle sticks. The chimney was a tube of PVC pipe, with a cloud of pulled-apart cotton pads added later. The cotton was teased out into a cloudy-shape, hot glued to a length of wire, then stuck together in layers with spray adhesive. The wire base was super important here to avoid the cotton melting into an unstructured lump of sticky goop when sprayed.

For those not in the know of Russian folklore, Baba Yaga is a witch who travels the Russian country in a cottage with chicken legs. My first introduction to the old broad was through the Hellboy comic series, as she is a major antagonist to Big Red across the decades. Chicken legs didn’t feel uniquely Midwest, so my first thought was a loon, whose mournful calls I grew up hearing across the lake water.

However, loons don’t really walk on land. Their legs are so far back on their body that they just scoot on their bellies like penguins—only pushing onto the shoreline to lay eggs. To get the full effect of a truly amphibious building, I decided to go with a duck.

Listen, I know this is a step by step process, but don’t do what I did to make the legs. Find another tutorial for how to attach legs to a structure. This whole part of the build was a massive pain in the ass, and frequently broke (more on that later).

Still here? Okay if you really want to know, I molded oven bake sculpey clay onto hollow metal tubing, which was bent to a walking gait. This caused a lot of anxiety since cutting the tubing had pinched the ends closed. I spent each baking session anxious that they would explode from the pressure building inside the tube. After the legs were done, I hot-glued nails to the top and pounded them into the underside of the barn. Once again, be sure to find another guide because I should have placed these in a way that better carried the weight and balanced the structure.

Red Barn Blues

Red barns aren’t unique to the Midwest, they can be found anywhere European colonizers went, but even centuries later they still cover this part of the country.

According to Jerry Apps (an author who dominates the “local history” sections of Wisconsin bookstores), “Many centuries ago in Europe, farmers preserved their buildings with linseed oil that they colored inexpensively with such things as animal blood from butchering or ferrous oxide, which is rust. The resulting color was a rather quiet red, not the fire engine red we sometimes see today. It became fashionable to have a red barn which contrasted nicely with the white farmhouse.” You can learn more about barn history here.

The barn required several coats of red, with some lighter and darker variations to dirty it up a little. A dry brush of light red and an oil wash helped bring out the texture of each individual wooden slat. The roof was plain white, which was oil washed with a green and white mixture to create a mossy and sodden look.

I’m really happy with how the windows turned out. To create the look of milky oil lamps, I just built the color up from a rust-like copper to a clean white, before adding another oil-wash. I thought about doing the same for the doorway, which was left open, but decided to add a mixed-media element to help convey the ghostly history of the piece.

Tavern culture is all consuming in Wisconsin (the Tavern League acts as our own shadowy Deep State), so I looked through the Wisconsin Historical Society for images that would present a warm and rustic tavern atmosphere. The image I selected actually ended up being a lumberjack cook shanty—a cafeteria where lumberjacks would quietly scarf down pancakes and other filling foods twice a day. I printed it out and pasted it in the open door with a few layers of mod podge and paint.

The geometric design on the front of the barn is a barn quilt. This is usually made of wood and paint, not an actual quilt (although it does use quilt patterns). According to Art and Object magazine, “Barn quilts are thought to date back around 300 years, when European immigrants brought the concept with them to Pennsylvania. Barns were generally not painted, so artwork was hung on the sides as a type of identification.” It’s since become a staple of American folk art, and it’s always sad to see a barn go nude. I cut a piece of card stock, painted it white, and used painters tape to paint a design I found online.

Painting the legs was deceptively easy. I primed the clay with clear sculpey glaze a few times to avoid the stickiness that paint on clay brings. Then I just painted and dry brushed the legs with a vibrant orange, and covered the underside with a variety of lush, waterlogged flora that ‘Da Bar Yaga would have picked up along it’s route.

The difficult part of painting the legs came from the repeat breaks they suffered. The entire support was flimsy, and the legs snapped twice at home and once AT the festival. What you see here is multiple tectonic layers of clay, hot glue, super glue, industrial glue, and more orange paint.

Finally, I added the tiny details which helped ground the piece in my world. I added small lily pads and lily flowers on the doorframes and windows, representing the teeming marshes and lakes this building would traverse. The name, ‘Da Bar Yaga, is a Yooperized play on Baba Yaga. Yooper is the slang term (and per my dad, a disparaging one) for residents of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (UP). Accents up there are THICK, and “the” is routinely shifted to “’da.”

The menus on the sides were one of the first images I had for this piece. It consists of:

• Fried perch: a staple of a Wisconsin Friday night fish fry.
• Pasties: a savory hand pie brought by the Cornish workers who worked the numerous mines in the UP.
• Booyah: a delicious soup brought to Wisconsin by Belgian immigrant.
• Coffee: The UP is home to the largest population of Finnish people outside of Finland (my dad’s side included), and Finns live off a steady diet of black coffee.
• Cold Beer: If you’re from the Midwest and have ever gone out drinking with someone from another part of the country, you begin to understand that we’re built different. And if your average Midwest drinker is an Orc, Wisconsinites are Uruk-hai.

There you have it! ‘Da Bar Yaga in all her makeshift glory. Thank you to those at Under the Dice Fest who had kind words to say about the piece, they truly meant the world to me. 

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the rest of my UTDF coverage. Next up: The Mordheim Board.

xoxo, Gray