Skip to main content

Coastal fort

Coastal fort 
First stratchbuild of the year! I made a simple coastal fort to go with my ship the Halve Maen. I forgot to take work-in-progress pictures, but construction was very straightforward.

I started by making a rectangular box out of two 15x15 cm MDF picture frames for the top and bottom and four 18x15 cm sheets of polystyrene for the walls. The 18 cm height of the walls meant that I could divide the tower into three 6 cm tall levels. I simply hotglued these together to form the basic shape and then added a parapet using some left over blue foam. I made the parapet 3 cm high - giving the tower a total height of 21 cm - with the cut-outs being 1.5 cm high. 

For the external staircase I used strips of cork that I cut from a coaster. As the coaster was 1 cm thick, six steps gave me the exact height to reach the first floor. I wish I could say that this was clever planning on my part, but I’m afraid it was completely down to luck! 

After this, I added details like the gun slits, some exposed bricks and a door out of thin cardboard. I then applied  two layers of wall filler/spackle with a brush to texture the building and strengthen the foam parapet.

Coastal fort

Then came the painting. I started with a coat of white wood primer from the DIY store to which I added a little bit of beige craft paint to give the tower a base coat of broken white. I then gave it two very thinned down washes of burned sienna followed by black. I then painted most of the details before giving everything a light drybrush of the original base coat. After this I added a green wash in some small areas to represent moss. Finally, before varnishing, I painted the door and hatch on the roof.

Dutch

English 

I also gave my Blood & Plunder minis a bit of a touch up, because I had been a bit too heavy-handed with the wash. A complete strip and repaint may look better still, but I don’t feel like doing that right now.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint:  I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...
2 comments
Read more

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt.   I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again.  Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario.   Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...
Post a Comment
Read more