Ahh, time is running too fast - two months since my last update ... Anyway, have been busy again and finished the main building, only proper painting needed. I found this photo on the net showing the real main gate of the El Morro fortress, so I wanted to come close to that but keeping wargames proportions in scale.
The gate itself was directly scribed into 4 mm sheet styrene, some wood grain added with coarse sandpaper and metalworks from plastic strips; rivets punched into the strips with a blunt needle. Humbrol light ochre basecoat and some brown ink washes after drying.
To create some depth the gate entrance was built with different layers of incised Selitron foamboard and polystyrene sheet. I found some good looking shields for decoration.
And a proper spanish fort needs a holy Mary above it's entrance ...
(cut up GW part). The greek temple style roof was glued together from sheet styrene and a piece of model railroad roofing material.
The finished piece before painting. For ease of painting the gate sheet was not glued behind yet.
And the finished result:
Now for something completely different ... I bought a box full of bark cheaply from an Ebay dealer to use the bark for the rocky ground around the high bastions. The bark was broken up into smaller pieces, cut to fit next to another with knifes and pliers and then fixed at the bottom of the walls with white glue and some needles. This was quite a messy affair, so don't try that in your living room ...
After a night's drying time the hollows between the bark pieces were filled in with ready made filler and smoothed out with brushes and some water, trying to follow the natural bark contours. The filler gets rock hard after one or two days.
Then all the ground areas of the fortress got some undercoat with coloured and thinned down filler, and all the walls were finished with their basecoats.
So, only some layers of paint and drybrushing onto the walls and ground areas, and the main monster will be done. That's my aim till the end of the coming week. Then off to Crisis, and after that looking for a fresh start on the (smaller) front works of the fortress.
03 March 2012, 03:43:49 PM
