Saturday 4 October 2014

Castle's keep is getting there

Finding the right brownish red combination for the roof wasn't that hard. I slapped together various combinations of paint (keeping track of the proportions, of course) until something appealed to me.
I settled on 70% Scarlet red and 30% Hull red. It's really starting to look the part!


Now, even a brand new castle rarely looks shiny and perfect, so I tried different ways of dirtying it up. Vallejo Smoke - while a nice wash for sóme things - didn't quite cut it, but Black glaze yielded very nice effects.
At first, I thinned it with tap water, but that left a white residue (from impurities in the water, I assume?), then I thinned with the old (milky white) Vallejo thinner, with mediocre results. Thinning with the new (clear) Vallejo thinner however, yielded nice results and kept the wash flowing a lot more nicely, to emphasize the seams.

Below a shot of the untreated back and dirtied up front.


Next step was all the wooden parts : doors, window shutters, drawbridge, ...
I painted these with Tank brown, but that was way too flat and unrealistic. So I painted each plank in a different shade. I just mixed some random drops of Tank brown and Tank dark yellow, painted the first plank, added a drop of yellow, painted a plank, added some brown, and so on.
After a Smoke wash, these came out rather nice, if I may say so myself.


I did the same for the 4 most prominent doors, but not gonna bother on the 20 other doors and 50+ window shutters. I'm already cross-eyed from doing the steel borders around all of them.