I’m so excited to finally share my case mod. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks and have been very impatient the entire time. I’m pretty sure my boyfriend Andrew is relieved that it’s over, too, especially since I had originally planned to do this all in one night… not sure what I was thinking, but that’s how little patience I have for extended projects. I’m working on it.

In any case (no pun intended), I think it turned out pretty good! I should preface this by stating that I have never done a case mod before. I’ve always wanted to do one but until recently, I’ve lacked the time/money/equipment to do so. Since I’ve joined our local hackerspace, I’ve been in modding mode and want to mod everything in my house. Computer cases are a good place to start. I love my Luna case but I wanted to spice things up a bit. Doing something Skyrim-related was a no-brainer. I was going to do something generic, but then I thought of doing the Dark Brotherhood since that is one of my favorite parts of both Oblivion and Skyrim. I knew I could do some fun things with lights and textures.

I wanted to emulate the sanctuary in Skyrim (not necessarily the Dawnstar one although I guess that’s the one that ends up serving as the sanctuary). I love the details like the stone wall, stained glass, candlelight, tapestries. I pulled a lot from elements like this:

The side of my case had a window of plexiglass, so that is where I put the stained glass. To do so, I outlined the design with a sharpie and then traced over it with a hot glue gun. I am definitely not a hot glue expert so it wasn’t perfect, but to be, fair neither is the drawing in the game itself so I figured it was okay if it wasn’t perfect. It is a dungeon, after all. I can only imagine how grimey that window probably is. I mean, who’s going to do the washing? Babette? A torture victim?

I got kind of lazy and just decided to leave my fan grill as-is, mostly because I wanted ventilation and I didn’t really know what else to do with it. I left half of it black and sprayed the rest of it with a stone-textured spray paint. But before I sprayed the whole side with stone, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t totally flat, since the opposite side would have some raised rocks. I added some wall texture to it before spraying it with the stone paint.

The door was a bit harder. I wanted to make it look like it was actually made from stone, but I wanted it to be light so it wouldn’t fall off my computer all the time. I thought about using fiberglass but I ended up using dry foam (the stuff you stuck fake flowers in) because it was lightweight and easy to mold. It is very crumbly, so I molded it first and covered it with a white primer to seal it all together. Once the primer dried, I sprayed it all with the same stone paint I had used for the stained glass side, and I also added a little bit of darker grey.

Please ignore my bad drawing.

For the other side, I wanted to incorporate a tapestry, but I didn’t want it to just rest flatly against the side of the case so I made some molds of rocks out of a hydrocal kit Andrew had in the closet.

Some of them were pretty  brittle but I coated them with glue, and then with the stone-textured paint, so they held together surprisingly well. We attached them to the case with hot glue and they haven’t budged at all.

I made the tapestry out of a corner of a canvas cloth that we use for crafting. I spray painted the red and did the black handprint with some acrylic paint and my own palm.

This side is easily my favorite part of the case.

I was really stuck for what to do on the top of the case, but a friend of mine suggested using a constellation from the menu, which I thought was a cool idea since I could incorporate lights into it. I chose Sneak since it seemed the most fitting for an assassin-themed mod.

I drilled holes into the top in the pattern of the stars. I didn’t want the snake outline to be against a busy background, since the other sides of the case already had a lot going on, but I also didn’t want it to be just a green outline against flat black. I found sparkly paint in black and blue that helped give it a starry, textured feel without making it too busy. It looks really cool in person and these pictures kind of suck, but they might give you an idea of how it looks.

I could not, for the life of me, take a decent picture of the lights on in the dark (if anyone could tell me which settings to use on a Nikon D40, I would be very much obliged) but this might give you a vague idea of what it looks like:

I also wanted some red light to emit from the fan grills on the side of the case (near the stained glass) and through the front panel of the case when the door is open. I took out the blue lights from the fan that was already in the case and replaced them with red. For the front grill, I gutted a broken fan and used the frame as a holder for lights.

The red lights look really cool and eerie in the dark, especially when they illuminate the text.

(Crappy picture again, sorry)

We also installed an LED to go inside the case as a backlight for the stained glass, and a button that controls the constellation lights.

Once all the wiring was complete and the paint was dry, we assembled it all together and that was that!

I can’t wait to start on my next mod. I’m going to deck out my laptop with some Portal-esque designs (I know that’s been done a lot but the colors in that game are so vibrant, and I have a white laptop that is dying to be spray painted…). I’m also going to make my brother an original case for his 16th birthday. In Skyrim news, I’m working on making all of the amulets of the gods since I think they are totally cool looking, and I may actually finish the Thieve’s Guild armor set I’ve been wanting to make for a while now.

Hope you enjoy my case mod! (And thanks to Andrew for all of his help )