Death Castle (Part 9)

PART 9

Posted on 9/1/2008 on Warhammer-Empire.

The doors have been attached to the tower. 

The tower has doors. 

This was more difficult than I imagined, but so far the results look good. I still need to figure out how to make handles and hinges but I figure I can work that out bit later. Note that the upper level door will be opening up to a deck/balcony that will be used as a fighting platform.

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This pic shows how the tower is going to relate to this section of the castle and I put a few models near it to get a vibe of what it all should look like after I complete it. As you can see I’ve base coated the castle walls already. I’m going to take the whole castle up to one more level of painting before I permanently mount it to the base.

Back to the tower, I began work on the tower’s crenelations. The main crenelations were made from the pieces originally cut from the walls at the start of this renovation project. As they are only vaguely the same size I’m hoping this unevenness will give the appearance that this castle is old and weathered.

This first pic shows the first two corners with a model on the tower’s top to give me a sense of scale. Note that one corner has a metal tube ‘bracketed’ to the tower’s base. This will be a banner holder. Once the project is complete I will make a series of interchangeable banners that can be switched out during play for different occupiers. The metal tube came out of an old Motorolla cell phone (Nextel i90). It’s amazing what kind of cool junk you can get out of old tech devices, but it’s usually more appropriate for 40k instead of fantasy.

Here is the tower with all of the main crenelations. In between them will be a short wall that extends the main wall up a bit provide a tad more cover the men on top. I’ll be adding that on tonight I hope. Again, the unevenness of crenelations will help convey that old worn-torn weathered look that I’m going for. Hopefully when the whole project is down one will think that the castle and tower were always part of the same model. I’m not sure how well it can be seen in this pic but there is now a wooden door in the center of the tower roof.

PART 9.1

Note: This 9.1 post was never posted on Warhammer-Empire for some reason, and the next post, Part 10, posted almost 2 months later, covers some of the things I wrote below. Never-the-less, for prosperity's sake and the simple desire for completeness, I shall include it here . 

I’ve finished the basic construction of the tower. I took a long time to fill in the gaps. By the way, I used Jo Sanja’s Texture Paste to do this. Texture past is usually used my painters to provide rugged surfaces for some embellishing techniques, or to fill in and smooth out a canvas before painting. I’ve found it works great with Styrofoam and cardboard. Some of the smaller gaps I used Elmers glue.

I then carefully added on the arrow slits. I’m glad that I bought these when I did as I’ve discovered they can be a bit of a challenge to find now.  

I then decided the doors needed more detail. I added crossbars to the 3 doors, and handles using wire rings.

This is basically a progress shot of the whole project.

What still needs to be done:

Painting, but at this point just base coating and maybe the second layer.

The tower’s balcony still needs to be completed and attached to the tower.

Expanding the main castle’s upper deck/ramparts of the walls.

Majestic in it's base coat. 

And the whole thing needs to be attached to the base. I’ve noticed, and you can see it in some pics throughout this thread, that since the two halves of the castle were joined together, it resulted in slight warping which is preventing some wall sections from touching the base. I’ve come up with a few ideas that can correct this and may actually work to the overall benefit to the castle’s overall look when completed.