Sunday, January 20, 2019

Death Castle (Part 12)

DEATH CASTLE PART 12

As Da Masta Chief  has recently (and kindly-ish) pointed out to me, and the followers on our Facebook Group,  I'm over due for an update on this project.

Death Castle in the present.

Last winter (2018) I set about painting the stone work on the walls of Death Castle. it was coming along decently. I got most of it finished over the course of about three Sundays. It started out with an Appel Barrel Graphite base coat over the entire thing. Thankfully Walmart sells that stuff in really big bottles so I have more than enough for this task and just about anything else that I use that color for.

Graphite basecoat. 

I slightly mismatched the highlight color with the tower, but I should be able to correct that decently with some touch-ups at some point. Overall, I like how it turned out. However it makes the upper quarter, the solid styrofoam sections, really stand out in an awkward way. And I was stumped on what to do about it. I brainstormed and discussed it with a few friends, but the answers I came up with didn't appeal to me. After many months of being stalled out on this thing, I came up with two workable solutions.

I swear that corner doesn't look that weird in real life!

Solution 1: Sheet styrene brick sections. Cut them to the pattern needed and glue them on. It worked out great on the roof top for this tower and I have made plans in the past to make other things using that stuff. I decided that this would be, due to the crude nature of this thing, expensive, time consuming, frustrating and likely to have crappy results.

Solution 2: Take a soldering iron to it and burn out some grooves. At first, I loved the idea. Then I thought about it and realized just how unforgiving any mistakes could be. One wrong move and I could really mess things up -badly!

After pondering on it for even longer, I have resigned myself to take my chances and go for it using Solution 2.  However, to avoid a house full of styrofoam fumes I will have to do it outdoors, so I likely won't do this until it warms up outside. So Spring/Summer is my penciled in expectation for the next time I will likely work on this thing.

It has been a long and strange trip for this thing so far, but the ride isn't over yet!

2 comments:

Da Masta Cheef said...

'-ish'...Indeed, that's as kindly as I get!

And what's wrong with a house full of toxic styrofoam fumes?

neverness said...

Well, it's at my folk's place and my kid is hanging about. I guess if we lived in Kingsport we would probably be used to to it...