Templar Tomb

I did a bit more work on the churches floor by cutting out foam where the wall and columns will be resting on. I wasn’t sure if it would be that stable with the foam, so I filled these areas with air-drying clay, and I might pin the columns and wall as well as use glue. Hopefully, that’ll make it fairly sturdy. I then used some making fluid for the clear resin windows, and I used tape for the edges of my floor and wall, and then proceeded to blast them with rattle cans (I also primed the bits of roofing, columns and all the knights and monks while I was at it).

I was trying to get a plastered and worn whitewashed look to the wall, so I used lots of different tones of off white and stuck it on using a sponge, but really not sure if you can see that in the photos. I then painted the base colours onto the unmasked bits of the windows and made a start on the tiled floor (I’ve said it before on another project, but Citadel’s death guard green is spot on for medieval green-glazed tiles and pottery). I finally used watered-down contrast paint (which I saw on the Miniature Realms YouTube channel), which seemed to give a nice weathered look to the roof timbers.

Worked on my church’s wall, with 3D printed windows (by Gothic Things) in clear resin so I can make some nice stained glass windows…hopefully. I used air drying clay to fill in the gaps between the wall’s window openings and the windows and once dry I sanded the clay parts down a bit to reshape and basically try and make them less rough.

I also 3D printed off my knights from knights and monks from Reconquest Designs and my church pews and a sitting monk from Tiny Furniture. The columns were from Scan the World and were scans of actual medieval columns taken from the collection at Musée Saint-Raymond in Toulouse, though I did a little bit of digital reshaping and resizing for my diorama.

I also resized the scans of my medieval wall paintings in Microsoft Word, which is actual quite easy to get your images to the right size or scale. I then got some special transfer paper and printed them off. I had tried this ages ago for some space marine shoulder pads, but as soon as I put them in water, all the ink just leaked out. After a bit of Google searching, I realised you have to apply several coats of clear spray lacquer, which I did. Hoping this will actually work this time.

Final thing I did was to do a bit of a dry fit of my wall, roof, floor and columns to see if it looked OK. I reckon it looks OK, but will hopefully look better with the knights and monks in and a bit of a prime.

After a bit of initial planning, I drew a set of accurate templates for the church diorama. For the floor, I used XPS foam and carved a tile pattern into it and marked out where the sarcophagus and pillars were going to be placed. For the wall, I used two sheets of foam cores and sort of clad it in balsa sheets. I cut three window openings and marked out where I wanted the wall murals to eventually be. I also decided to put in a section of the roof and made carved supports for the joists. I used a mix of balsa wood and good old-fashioned coffee stirrers to make the roof, which will partially rest on some 3D printed columns (still to do that, so no pictures).

I carved out a hole in the XPS foam floor as well, and I made the main coffin out of Milliput and used my original 3D scan for the lid (just lopped off the bottom in Blender). The original excavation in 1912 said that the interior of the sarcophagus was shaped so that there was an area for the body and head, and I tried to replicate that as best as I could. I stuck a couple of magnets in as well as I thought it would be a nice reveal for folks to show a nice skelly from TableTop Miniatures in the coffin. Just in case anyone is interested, some of the bones survived in the coffin when it was opened, and there were bits of leather from a scabbard in there as well, though they’ve disappeared in the intervening years, probably in a box somewhere in the local museum.

I managed to get quite a bit done with the planning and initial building of the my Templar Diorama. I did a very rough initial sketch to see how it would look. I wanted some stain glass windows, small columns (possibly painted wood), church pews and a group of priests, monks and a group of returning Templars praying at the tomb.

I looked at painted examples of churches down in England with surviving medieval murals (think the Scottish reformation did a better job of removing art from churches, as I couldn’t find any examples up here) and of contemporary paintings of Templars and knights, and then started to draw and paint my versions of these. I then scanned my paintings and tidied them up a bit in Inkscape (a vector graphics programme).

This is a project I was working on late last year, but it just got shelved due to life and work getting in the way. I had got into photogrammetry and 3D printing a few years ago, and I got a chance to scan a templar’s stone sarcophagus as part of a workshop at Saltcoats Museum. I also managed to help out on a volunteer dig at Ardrossan Castle and got to see the nearby ruins of Ardrossan Church, where the sarcophagus was found in 1912. The upshot of this was an attempt to use a mix of a 3D scan of the sarcophagus, a bit of digital sculpting and a lovely miniature from Vinci Miniatures to create a reconstruction diorama of how the coffin would have looked in the church during the medieval period.

I realised after a bit more research that I got a few things wrong, such as; the sarcophagus was set into the churches floor when it was found, the columns I sculpted were a bit small (and its not entirely clear if there were any there in the first place), the churches walls were probably covered with plaster and like a lot of churches of that time would have been garishly painted.

So I decided to redo the reconstruction and make it bigger and try to make it more accurate, with the eventual plan being to pass it on to the local museum or historical society. I’m still using a bit of 3D printing but to save a bit of time I decided to not sculpt my own bits and use models from Scan the World, Tiny Furniture, TableTop Miniatures and Reconquer Designs (all from MyMiniFactory) to speed up the process with the rest being built with a mix of XPS foam, balsa wood, milliput and build it onto a cheap picture frame from B&Q. I do want to do the church wall paintings myself, so I’m going to try and create slide transfers from my own drawings and paintings rather than try and freehand stuff which I’m not great at.

Hopefully, I’ll actually get this all done by June and not have to go for Spring Clean 2026.