Bricks and Mortar – A castle at last

I’ve been remiss in not posting any updates in the past few months but I’m hoping to rectify that in the next few weeks as the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge starts in a few days. This will mean that I’ll try and produce something hopefully a new unit every week for next 3 months. The only problem is with all that painting and basing blogging time is again at risk of being neglected.

Some time ago I got sucked into Footsore Miniatures Barons War Kickstarter and while painting and collecting these the thought occurred to me that a medieval army needs a home. Furthermore I thought that it was only fitting and proper that such a home really ought to be a castle!

I looked at various options and even considered scratch-building one but I don’t particularly enjoy modelling and some commercially available models were eye wateringly expensive before even contemplating the added cost of posting them to NZ. Then I saw this video on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNymSvkhOHo&list=PLEYbpEflCP_rGOHU7njcan4G9mxWPXIDI

Its a great channel, he’s a very clever and entertaining chap who is regularly to be found on the plastic Crack Podcast. Many of his interests coincide with mine and consequently I placed an order for a few of the plastic kits from Tabletop Workshop. (Available from Northstar Miniatures https://www.northstarfigures.com/list.php?man=291&page=1

As is usual they sat around for a few months and then I started to put them together but before long I went and bought quite a few more walls and another tower and ended up with this lot. I actually brought some back from Partizan this year. Some years earlier as an impulse buy I’d bought a Renedra tower and had picked up a Ziterdes square tower that I have since incorporated to give some variation

The Renedra tower sits behind the wall and the Ziterdes tower is on the right

The next step was a permanent baseboard but the Knauf boards I’ve used for hills in the past no longer seem available in NZ so I had to settle for some polystyrene and had to reduce its height to match taht of my current TSS boards

Cutting the river/moat was laborious so I decided to melt my way through!

The usual PVA and sand and grit mix next

painted and drybrushed with my usual colours

Now with added flock

A touch of base colour now added

When I poured the Woodland Scenics realistic water I thought this is taking an age and loads of filling – that’s when I discovered that using a hot pipe to melt the polystyrene hadn’t been a good idea as I’d gone through the boardd and the water was escaping and stuck it to my work table! I had to saw it off

Here’s a closer look at the Ziterdes stuff

Winos will want to know that’s Rockburn Stolen Kiss Rose in the background!

Finally this week I got around to the drybrushing and finishing

So there it is, hopefully I’ll get another post in tomorrow showing some recent figures I’ve finished off