Castle!

Soon after I finished making this I took it down to the local club in Oxford for a game of AoS. It was just a small game, but it was fun and great to see the castle on the table. It’s been staring down at me forlornly from the top of a cupboard ever since, dolefully awaiting it’s next moment in the sun.

The game we played involved a small band of heroes trying to reclaim the castle from a horde of Khorne daemons who had claimed it. It was great.

The grey turned out slightly darker than I’d like, but acceptable (and I’m not repainting the damn thing!). I used GW washes to add some discolouration the recessed bricks and round the bottom of the walls. I then added a load of tufts and clump foliage. The clump foliage was a bit garish at first, so I daubed some brown paint on it to bring it down a bit.

I covered the floor of the courtyard with watered down filler to give a rough earthy texture. I like working with filler as, if you make a mistake (big dollop on the wall for example) you can just add water with a paint brush until it’s smoothed out.

I also covered the side of the steps with filler, which was a bit of a massive pain to get vaguely smooth.

Here is a picture of the whole castle with the build phase complete. I’m more or less pleased with how the construction turned out I think. I’m not the greatest model maker, but it’ll serve. ?

I’m quite pleased with the gaming possibilities the layout creates. I can imagine figures leaping off that wooden wall walk and clambering over the sloped roof of the stable. Hurling each other off the steps or over the walls down onto the rocks. Hiding in the open doorways, or launching an ambush out of those dark spaces under the wooden bridgy bits.

I think if I had more patience I might have made the stone blocks smaller on average – I think they start to look more fake the larger they get. The lord’s tower has very small bricks, so that contrast could be a bit jarring – though someone pointed out to me that maybe that tower could be the oldest part of the castle, built centuries before the rest in a different style. I like that idea.

Here you can see the passage through the gatehouse. I put an internal door inside to add a bit of realism, though it doesn’t open. The portcullis is made out of cocktail sticks – it is glued in place and doesn’t lower, so is just for effect.

I used a sharp retractable pencil to score the shape of stone blocks onto the blue foam. I used the edge of the pencil to soften up the edges of each block to make them irregular and rounded, and I pressed my finger into the foam in random patterns to give it and dented and less flat look. I added cracks and damage to the walls with a bit of pencil jabbing. One thing that seems to work quite well is to choose a few random bricks and squash them down a millimetre or two with something flat and square, so they look slightly recessed. This helps reduce the flatness of it all.

You can tell my wife must have been out at this particular moment since there is an open tube of super glue lying on the carpet, without a care in the world. Live life in the edge, eh ?