sho3box

Continued from parts 1, 2 and 3.

After the quite time consuming process of sticking all of that stuff to the castle sections the last time, I set about painting them.

Anything made from silver plastic (the Hexagon stuff and the sprues) just got a load of black emulsion paint slopped onto it which I then wiped with a rag, removing most of the paint from everywhere but the recesses.  Anything else that was showing its original colour was then simply painted black.

It was at this point that I first realised how Masters of the Universe the whole project had become.  Regardless of how desirable or not that was it was too late to worry about that at that stage though.  Main priority: get it finished.  All other considerations secondary.

Some drybrushing of metallic areas was next followed by a big dirty wash of brown/black mix over the metallic bits and some of the red areas.

By this stage in the process I wanted to add just a little bit more junk and other stuff to the tower parts.  I couldnt face it though.  My enthusiasm for the project was waning and I decided that I would rather get it finished to the standard that it was currently at than get bogged down on more detailing.  If I still think that the towers are a little too bare once the whole thing is finished I can go back and do some more work on it at a later date.  Maybe.

Note the layout of the components in a city wall configuration. I hope to use that layout in a few scenarios in the future.

The next step was to start drybrushing cheap silver acrylic paint on to the textured “metal” areas.  In places I also added a few patches of metallic bronze to the recesses beforehand, but I didnt go nuts with it.  The bronze was to break up the  silver areas with a little visual texture.  This worked a little better than I expected all things considered, which was nice.

All of the soon-to-be-detailed areas were drybrushed at this stage too.

After all of that I mixed some Raw Sienna with some emulsion black and water and ended up with a sloppy, dirty brown/green colour.  I applied it in streaks to a few wall sections, mainly to cover up small errors from previous steps.  Largely I applied it in streaks to parts of the metallic areas, both to take some of the shine of the silver off them and to add definition to some of the parts in as lazy a fashion as I dared.

I then added some streaks of watered down Model Colour Hot Orange (or “Naranja Tostada” as it was called on the label.  That’s a way better name than “Hot Orange” isnt it?) to represent rust and to give a few more areas to draw the eye a little.

I was by now seriously running out of enthusiasm.  At this point I was very glad that I had not been unrealistically precious about the end product during earlier stages.  If I had been then I would likely still be stuck at the detailing stage.  If I was still detailing, then in all likelihood the castle would yet again have been put into storage in the attic, unfinished.

But for once experience and a little bit of knowledge about my strengths (and primarily my weaknesses) when getting up to this sort of thing paid off.  I was finally far enough down the road that barring an unforeseen disaster I was sure that the thing was going to get finished to an ok standard.  Thank Christ.

So I spent half an hour or so painting a little detail on to a couple of the smaller bits of visual interest that I had attached to the model earlier.  I actually found this smaller and neater work therapeutic after all of the big brush stuff that I had been getting up to.  I wasn’t as careful with the detail parts as I would be with a regular 28mm figure, but I did make a little effort.  An occasional bit of visual interest here and there draws the eye and helps to give a big terrain project like this a bit of character.

The detailed areas were:

• a slightly warped re-cast piece of an old Grendel cyber-bar set (bought when starting college in 1995 and subsequently re-cast as an experiment on my college course) 
• a wall of monitors that came from the interior of a Space Marine Land Raider kit (the part was left out of the assembly on the tank in 2001. At time of writing the tank remains approximately 80% finished…) 
• a pair of resin Grendel cryogenic tanks left over from my original Space Hulk project (that’s the 1990 one, not the 2010 one…) 
• a lone skull impaled on a spike from a Chaos Space Marine spiky sprue on a piece of the set dressing stuck to the outside of one of the wall sections. 

That was that for the (hopefully) penultimate fort making session.  The next evening with the fort will be my last.  I hope.

To be continued.

Filed under: Terrain | Tagged: 2011, Gorkamorka, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Standard Falls |