Suddenly : Inspiration!

Inspired by recent good experience with Mig Abteilung 502 oil paints, I grabbed a kit that's been waiting to be finished waaaay too long already (and may take a long time to complete still).

I used "starship filth" underneath the chimneys and a generous application of "olive green" on the bottom part of the walls. The first, I kinda dry-brushed on, the latter just lightly applied randomly, then wiped off with a cloth.

(walls are still shiny, awaiting a matte coat later)

First time oil paints

I recently became quite intrigued by the use of oil paints for adding filters, streaking and what-not. I have read about these techniques often, but was hesitant to take the plunge.
The main incentive came from Foxx's video from eModels.uk, you can find it here.
He was building and weathering the Colonial Viper which I also happen to be building and his explanations are very thorough.

I found a webshop in the Netherlands (not so easily actually) that sold Mig's Abteilung 502 oil paints and ordered a variety of colours. Today I decided to try and add some streaking to the castle's raised walkway. It's still drying and will probably change somewhat when a matte layer is added later.

Castle progress and future

After all the washes and wooden parts and more washes, here are the intermediate results. The gatehouse and the main keep are as good as done, except for some 20 more window shutters.

When my good friend and colleague, loyal blog-follower and fellow AD&D-player Nick announced he was taking a roadtrip through the US, an idea started to develop in the back of my head. It took a few days before I realized the potential and I asked him to see if he could find a Walmart and bring me some "Future" (currently known as "Pledge Multi-Surface Floor Finish") as it is unobtainable in Europe and costs way too much to have it shipped over.

If you have no idea what future is, you must not be a modeller, but suffice to say it's one of the most widely used products for glossy finish or general varnish in the modelling world.
Main reasons for using it are it's excellent levelling qualities (no brushstrokes), as a protective layer before (and after!) decals and the fact that it's many times cheaper than the Alclad varnishes I've been using so far.

Flash forward a few months, upon Nick's return, a shiny bottle was sitting on my desk. The bottle says "Tile & Vinyl floor finish", but some research and inquiry tought us this is the 2011-incarnation of the same product. The bottle must have been sitting on the shelves for some time, but it has no expiration date and this quantity should easily last the remainder of my modelling career.

Some people airbrush future, some swear by handbrushing it. A little hesitant to put this in my airbrush, I decided to do some first applications with a normal brush. Below is the front and back of the raised walkway as a before-and-after.
Applying the future was super-easy and it indeed levels very nicely. The finish is very glossy, but that's a good thing if you want to apply panel-line washes (the glossier the finish, the easier the wash finds the little details). Gloss can be removed afterwards with a matte varnish or dullcoat.

Castle's keep is getting there

Finding the right brownish red combination for the roof wasn't that hard. I slapped together various combinations of paint (keeping track of the proportions, of course) until something appealed to me.
I settled on 70% Scarlet red and 30% Hull red. It's really starting to look the part!

Now, even a brand new castle rarely looks shiny and perfect, so I tried different ways of dirtying it up. Vallejo Smoke - while a nice wash for sóme things - didn't quite cut it, but Black glaze yielded very nice effects.
At first, I thinned it with tap water, but that left a white residue (from impurities in the water, I assume?), then I thinned with the old (milky white) Vallejo thinner, with mediocre results. Thinning with the new (clear) Vallejo thinner however, yielded nice results and kept the wash flowing a lot more nicely, to emphasize the seams.

Below a shot of the untreated back and dirtied up front.

Next step was all the wooden parts : doors, window shutters, drawbridge, ...
I painted these with Tank brown, but that was way too flat and unrealistic. So I painted each plank in a different shade. I just mixed some random drops of Tank brown and Tank dark yellow, painted the first plank, added a drop of yellow, painted a plank, added some brown, and so on.
After a Smoke wash, these came out rather nice, if I may say so myself.

I did the same for the 4 most prominent doors, but not gonna bother on the 20 other doors and 50+ window shutters. I'm already cross-eyed from doing the steel borders around all of them.

Painting an entire castle

It was about time I spent some more time on our medieval castle.
The pink interior for the "wizard tower" (female gnome mage with a Hello Kitty fixation) turned out REALLY pink, almost to the point of not being able to look right at it. Since it will be concealed and only visible through the windows, it may not be that bad though. After painting the doors, I closed the tower up and attached it to the main keep.

One of the merlons on top of the battlements had to make room for an extra watchtower. I wanted to avoid it being visible through the narrow window slits. Power tools for the win!

Some serious gaps here and there where attacked with Tamiya putty. I put down tape alongside both sides of the gap (to protect the plastic from the rather abrasive putty), spread putty liberally, then lightly spread it down with a spatula. I removed the tape immediately after, to have a clean line and to avoid breaking the dry putty afterwards.

A couple of hours of cutting and gluing in front of the television (finally watching Numb3rs now), we also have a gatehouse (with functional drawbridge, portcullis and double doors) and a raised walkway.

3-4 hours of priming and painting later, we have the result below. Windows and doors are taped from the inside, to protect the light grey interior. I deliberately sprayed the yellow/grey in uneven layers, to attempt to get some slight colour variation. Under harsh light, it looks a bit weird, but I'm hoping further washes will modify the intensity anyway. I used 70% Dark Yellow and 30% US Grey (Vallejo).

Next up : finding a good colour combo for the roof tiles. I'm thinking a mix of Hull red (which is very brown red) with a few drops of Scarlet red. I try to work with the colours I have available, instead of just keeping on adding more and more different paint bottles that never get used more than 20% anyway.

Castle - Progress report

I haven't been modelling a lot these last 2 weeks, but little by little the castle pieces are taking shape.

Many parts are uniform, but can have optional parts removed to make windows, doors, or different kinds of wall sections. This means a lot of cutting is required. While this can be done with a simple hobbyknife, I am extremely happy to recently have bought a motor tool. It's a bit pricey as an initial investment in a new tool, but definitely worth it when you're cutting pieces in half in a few seconds.

Below a picture of all the wall sections that make up the keep. Some careful planning is needed to find which windows go where (see previous post). This parts also have battlements on top, that needed to be removed.

I intend to make the top of the tower removable, so some extra attention to the interior is required. I removed all locators on the inside walls, some of which I have no idea what they were intended for, and filled up all the holes. The dining room table is filling up nicely.

Meanwhile, 3 wall sections were put together. It required a lot of pressure to keep them flush, but I didn't feel like holding them in my lap for half an hour, so I picked up some of my heavier books to do the work for me.

Below is a picture of the main keep starting to take form.

The kit provides 3 watchtowers, with 6 or 7 different ways of placing them. The towers have no interior and if the light is positioned correctly, you can see inside. Maybe I should have removed that part of the wall, so looking through the arrow slits wouldn't show the battlements inside.

Having the option to model these watchtowers in different ways, leaves you with some spare parts. I used my trusty motortool to remove a door from one of these parts and glued it inside a corner of the tower. This will provide passage to the watchtower that will be fixed to the outside of it.

I spoke earlier of the issue with the obvious seams. The problem is you can't just fill them and sand them flush afterwards because that would remove the stone texture details. The solution was rather simple and looks okay afterwards. I just placed (Vallejo) putty in the biggest gaps and holes and went over it with a (soaking) wet finger. After it's dried (and painted), it looks convincing enough to look like masonry, or at least a lot better than leaving the holes in place.

Don't try to do the same with Tamiya putty. That stuff is of a whole different (chemical?) composition. I wouldn't touch it too often with bare skin. It eats away at the plastic as well. For SOME applications, the Tamiya putty is better though, as it seems to dry harder and faster. The Vallejo putty always remains a little malleable, making it harder to sand flush against any surface.
I mention this because sanding Vallejo putty never seems to get a smooth surface. The sanding stick/paper always hollows out the putty because it's too soft, I think.

I intend to leave the base as a piece of rock, so was looking for a "rocky" kind of grey. My first choice was "Dark Sea Green", which may not seem evident, but in some languages this paint is called "Blueish grey" (translated back to English for your convenience), making it perhaps a little more logical. Anyway, a first layer looks promising. I tried giving it different amounts all over, to let the black primer shine through and not create a uniform colour. I will attack this later with a darker wash.

The next colour choice - the walls - is a little more difficult. I'm trying to achieve a sandy grey kind of look. For my first experiment I chose US Grey and Tank yellow. I mixed it 50/50 and sprayed the bottom section of the walls.

The yellow is hardly noticeable, so I mixed again 80% yellow and 20% grey. I thinned it to make it easier to spray, but ended up overthinning it. On the black primer the effect is okay-ish, but on the grey it's way too yellow. The section above it is without any thinner.

Since I've been priming most of the pieces with black because I just can't seem to get the grey spraying right, I'm leaning towards 60/40 for the next try.

Thanks for reading.

Castle - Planning ahead

Planning ahead in any project with more than 30 pieces is a good thing. Blindly following building instructions - particularly in a complex or very big build - can lead you into difficult situations. While I started removing parts from the sprue for my castle's keep, something seemed odd about some of the window's placement. I started going over the instruction, taking notes and counting how many parts were actually in the box.

The complete castle requires 695 parts. The box contains easily over 800, because there's some leeway here and there during construction and many sprues are duplicated, but not always all parts are needed.

There are 34 doorframes, 34 windowframes, 24 grates, 36 doors and 54 shutters provided. 1 shutter is gone (the carpet monster requires the occasional sacrifice), so make that 53. If I comb through the instructions, it requires 33 doorframes, 28 windowframes, 20 grates, 13 doors and 56 shutters. Leaving me with a few spare parts (many doors), but 3 shutters short.

The keep
Looking at the construction photo's of the keep, something struck me as odd. All the outside windows in the castle walls are barred shut with a grate, as well as all windows on the right-side of the keep, which functions as part of the outer wall. But the back of the keep - also part of the outer wall - has regular windows with shutters. It makes more sense to bar all windows (at least up to a certain distance from the ground) and not design a built-in flaw in the backside, to attract burglars or overzealous adventurers.

Some re-organizing - while keeping track of available parts - turned out all barred-up windows on the first-floor and shuttered windows on the second floor.

This leaves me with more than enough doors and just enough doorframes to add some extra doors to the ground level of a few select wall segments. These would be doors to things like stables, armories or barracks. It would be illogical to only have ONE door at ground level (leading to the main keep) where all personnel would have to go through and leave dirty footprints in those precious carpets.

The gatehouse
There's a big issue with the gatehouse. In the front is a big drawbridge - of course - that can be raised or lowered across the moat. Behind that is a portcullis. The back of the gatehouse has a double door, with a big wooden bar to keep it shut if the outer gate has failed against intruders.

So far, so good. But between the gatehouse and the main keep is a raised walkway. The two constructions that make up this walkway, have arches underneath, but only along one axis. The other two sides are completely shut (marked in green below), blocking movement from one segment to the other AND blocking the big gate (marked in red below) in the back of the gatehouse.

I see no solution but to completely eliminate all parts A2 from the raised walkways. It wouldn't be losing too much structural integrity, since they'll be attached to the gatehouse and the main keep anyway.

The tower
Blindly following the instructions for the tower, lead me into the situation below : a window partially facing a blind wall. The window needs to go and I'll try to repair it, but it will remain noticeable, no doubt.

Another lesson learned about going over the instructions before commiting parts to glue.

Castle construction continues

I've been doing pieces of the castle almost every night, in front of the television. There's a TON of pieces (I'll count how many for my next post), all with many sprue attachment points that need to be cleaned up. It's tedious, but with NCIS in the background, some progress is slowly made. 

The base is done. A lot of scotch tape persuaded the "lid" to stay on the base while the liquid cement performs it's magic. I'm also glad I have my set of iron files, because 1 to 2 mm needed to be removed all around to make it fit flush with the rock base.

The seams between the flat pieces are very large, because the cobblestone-detail doesn't go all the way to the edge. Unlike a jetfighter's fuselage, I can't just fill the gap and sand it flush. Too much detail would be lost that I can't just repair. It's more than just rescribing a panel line. The stone texture is very fine, which is good, but I doubt I can reproduce it in puttied areas.

I decided to bite the bullet and see what would happen. I filled the largest seams with putty and scraped it flush with a spatula. About half of the seams will be hidden by further contructions, but some will remain partially visible.

 
A quick glance at the underside to show a pretty sturdy construction. While carrying it around, I have bumped walls, doorframes and even dropped it once. Sturdy construction indeed!

Second piece finished is the walkway that leads up to the main gate. Construction is a little awkward in certain steps, where you're glueing 4 pieces into a square, without much bracing or connector pins. Just hold it in your hands until the glue has done a part of it's work and you can let go again. You cannot clamp 2 pieces at a 90 degree angle, unless you build a specific rig or have more advanced tools.
Time flies by anyway, all recorded episodes of NCIS are done, we move on to Person of Interest.

Up close, we again see the seams we will have to hide somehow. Not sure yet what I'm gonna do. Also, is it just me, or is that angle pretty steep to expect horse and carriage to get up those slippery stones?

Next up is one of the three towers and a connecting wall piece (all pictures below already primed in grey). The contruction with 6 connectors seems very sturdy, but the bottom two don't match the tower's holes. They're off by 3 mm, which is more than just builder's error. Meh, 4 is enough, so I snipped them off.

The tower consists of 4 pieces, that don't fit too easily. Some of the stone pattern is also lost when glueing it all together. I tried adding the grooves (for lack of knowing the correct word) between the stones again with a hobby knife. Up to a point, that seems to have worked, although I made them a little too pronounced. An actual scribing tool would probably help, but I hesitate at buying tools I wouldn't need much.

A view of the inside shows what I mean by "not fitting too easily". You would assume the round piece to at least touch all 4 walls. From the outside, looking in (through a door or window), you won't notice it. Once the tower is closed, it's pretty dark in there.

Doors and window frames reuse the same parts. For the barred windows (in the outside wall, that don't open), you snip off the hinges. I filled with putty, but forgot it would shrink. Next windows will be puttied, allowed to dry more than last time, than sanded flush. I'm no perfectionist, but when perfection is simply a matter of doing it right, I should not hesitate to at least try.

A shot in frog perspective shows it will probably be an  impressive castle for my 1/72 scale adventures.

A view of the tower interior from both sides. It's always nice to have posable doors and windows when there is at least SOME detail on the inside. I always wonder why you can find so many kits with posable hatches, that just reveal an empty plastic interior.

With construction on the base complete, I airbrushed a first coat of black primer (back to black, since the grey still feels icky). It's a good thing I bought 200 ml bottles of the primer.
I taped off the areas where the walls and keep will be placed, so the glue can get a good bond, plastic to plastic, without paint interfering.
By the time this thing was finished, I could smell the compressor getting hot. No need to see if the safety would kick in, so I finished it up and called it a day.