Hi everybody!
Well, I've been away for a while, as some of you may have noticed. What should have been a couple of days' absence turned into almost a couple of weeks. I have a lot of stuff to catch up with, but one thing I wanted to share right now is the castle which is being prepared for the "Goodbye 6th Edition" siege game planned for late August / early September. The plan is to do a three-way siege battle with our regular little gaming circle - Dennis, Frank, and myself. Before you can play a siege you need a fortress, and this stage of the project is now all but finished!
It started when I purchased a Warhammer Fortress on eBay several weeks ago. I mucked up the conversion rates (between Euros, GPB, and US Dollars, there's a lot of room for error) and ended up paying about €15 more than if I had purchased it in a local shop. Narf! But hey, I had a castle delivered to my door all the way from Vermont, which has to be worth something. I also bought a pack of arrow slits.
First of all, the GW Fortress is an
awesome kit. It really is. For one thing, it is staggeringly huge. The pictures on the web and in WD do not do it justice - which is odd, considering stuff usually looks
bigger in WD. You can merrily forget about placing it in a square in the middle of the table, as the attackers would have no room to deploy! In my opinion, it is well worth its price (blasphemy!).
The one I got was in a bit of a sorry shape though. It had obviously been stored under less than ideal conditions for quite some time, causing some of the pieces to warp, and it had been partly assembled with sticky tape, which had spent a quiet few years making itself a pain to scrape off. The beam which secures the fortress gate was missing, as were the additional doors. Oh well - it was still a fotress, and still a very nice kit, so we were going to ensure it found a good home with us.
First of all we needed to do a little shopping. We needed another wall section so the fortress could be arranged in a U-shape along a table edge, and we'd set our sights on GW's "roughcoat" primer to get a fine-grain texture on the whole thing. The local shop had run out of roughcoat however, so we dropped by a paint store, where we struck gold - and old box of textured spray was pulled from under a table and after the dust was blown off, we were told we could have three cans for €10. Bonus!
We'd established that we wanted to steer away from the classic stone grey fortress, and do something more sand-coloured, so we bought two cans of "rust effect" spray for a nice, reddish-brown basecoat, and a can of fine-texture teal for the second layer. Then we got a couple of bottles of Vallejo Armadillo Khaki and a bottle of Vallejo Off White for the drybrushing. All set an ready to go, we set up a table in the garage of Dennis' parents and got to work.
The first task was to clean the parts up and assemble them properly. As you can see in the picture, we didn't use any of that pansy plastic glue, but brought out the big guns. That's Dennis doing the shooting by the way, I'll be in the next picture (Frank had the good sense to be out of town for the weekend). Next we applied the rust effect spray.
That would be me then (still without a moustache). The rust effect spray turned out to be really, really nasty stuff. Not only did it stink like pestilent hell, it had a very nasty tendency to obscure detail, so we could only apply a very light layer, instead of the complete coverage we had planned. Then it turned out the stuff needed about 24 hours to set completely. D'oh! Lesson learned: Read the bloody labels. We kicked back and watched
Serenity, returned to the garage to find the stuff still wet, and decided to let it sit overnight. I stayed the night over at Dennis and his girlfriend's, and the next day we returned in the early afternoon to find it well-dried.
This had been a disappointment so far, but we were here now and by Sigmar we would finish the job. Fortunately, the teal spray went on without problems and set in about ten minutes.
Now things were looking up - the effect achieved by teal-over-rust looked very good for a basecoat. Sadly, we had neglected to properly fill the gaps at the corners of the towers, and had to fix that with the squirt gun, leaving unsighly white edges which - even after painting - would remain a bit of an eyesore for the nit-picker.
Fortunately, the weather was really nice that day, so we took the castle out to the patio for drybrushing and detail painting. Who says wargamers should get out more?
This stage was a breeze. The drybrushing went off without a hitch, as did the detail work. The Vallejo paints proved absolutely golden - the squirty nozzle bottles are brilliant and the paints themselves are very well pigmented (ie. they cover very well). After a few hours of work, we had a nearly-finished castle to be proud of:
To give you an idea of just how amazingly huge the thing is:
(note that the tower corners look better in the real - the camera flash brings them out)
Some work still remains to be done. Dennis will be putting some flock on the castle to simulate moss growth, making it look less "clean", and I will be painting a bunch of shields to decorate the gatehouse and the towers. We also need to build a collection of siege equipment, but I'll be kicking it on Tenerife for the rest of the month, so let's leave that up to Dennis and Frank shall we?