Building the Castle Stalgar

 I usually don't do terrain but this one just kept coming together well I felt compelled to keep going on it. It took probably three months or so, but that was intermittent in between smaller things. Still, this is probably one of the larger things I've made for a while, and it was really fun!

Here's a finished shot to start out with! I'm really excited how it turned out, this whole project has been a treat.

Naturally, I got started with doodling my plans. I knew I wanted several walls in non-square angles, and a few spots where large models could fit. I also knew that there should be several levels, and a citadel-esque building, preferably on the side of a mountain or something, to make the castle feel like it's built into a defensive location.

I began by simply cutting and hot-gluing a bunch of leftover cardboard harvested from amazon boxes. This was a lot of fun, especially the freeform cutting and sculpting of the mountainous sections. I also ended up eating a bunch of pirouette cookies at the same time, so I used the cardboard tin it came it as a tower - it just felt right. Since it was all cardboard panels, the entire piece was extremely lightweight. The entire time, too, I kept a few different sizes of minis nearby to constantly check the scale of the flat areas.

Once the rough shapes had been blocked in, I grabbed some paper napkins and mod-podged them onto the surface to cheaply fill the gaps and literally paper over rough spots. It ended up looking really good, with lots of little detail, so I'll for sure do this again for large rocks.

Then, I started cutting pink insulation foam to form the crenelations and detail bricks. I also decided to go a very detailed route, and used popsicle sticks on all the parapets to give them a realistic look. While most castles in the grimdark Warhammer (especially those overtaken by Skaven) are ruined and decrepit, I wanted this one to be usable in most situations by most factions. So I wanted it to be whole and undestroyed - if a little old.

I also used the "Model Magic" air clay that I've talked about before. I have no idea what it's made of, but I spread it over the walls and used a blue-stuff mold pressed into it to add brick details. I knew it wouldn't want to make that many bricks, and this was extremely quick detail that paid off in a big way. I'm definitely going to use this technique again, and the clay is so low weight that the entire piece weighs almost nothing. It's a winner!

I also added ground rubble to flat sections and added a small protruding terrace for heroes to peer over the battlefield from. I also punched a hole in the tower, and added a conical roof with shingles. Then, I used some plaster molds and pink-insulation off cuts to the rock sections, just adding texture and noise. 

Then, I hit it with a whole bunch of texture paste, then my classic mod podge and black paint primer mixture! (Really, these things happened in separate steps as you can see by the picture. I work like that, getting bored of one aspect and switching to another). Anyway, it's all primed now, and it's that magical moment where it actually looks like a real thing and not just glued-together-garbage.

Once I got into painting, I knew I wanted a visual separation between the rocks of the mountain and the carved stone of the castle itself. I started with overbrushing (like drybrushing but with a wetter brush, getting roughly a 75% coverage. Painting over, but leaving some of the previous coat poking through) my black primer with the base colors for each of those. Once the castle stones were in a good spot, I picked several out with (probably too much, honestly) saturated colors like red and green. The goal was to give it some variation in color once washed. Then, I washed the whole piece with different light-brown and black washes to try and get some interesting colors of the stone bricks' grout. I'm not really sure this worked, but oh well.

Then, finally - I came back the next day with a whole bunch of careful drybrushing, picking out each of the parts with subtly different color white tints. The mountain stones with blue, the castle with pure white, and the ground with a light tan. This really helped visually separate each of the sections and made it look more cleanly "designed" or something.

Anyway, here's just a bunch of pics of the results!

So excited to play this with some half-baked rules in AoS or other miniature games.

Thanks for reading, as always.

- Miss Captain Bear