Converting the Citadel Mighty Fortress Part 2.

Converting the Citadel Mighty Fortress Part 2.

So I promised you a breached wall section and here it is for those that care. I'm rather chuffed with how it turned out but I'll make this a quick pictorial with but a few words. Still so much to do.

 

The breached section is made from one of the vast surplus of gateway sections you get from three sets. It is going to need a base but because I don't want it any higher then the rest of the fortress I start by slicing off the bottom mm a few cm either side of the gateway.

 

 I then mark up the base to fit in the gap. I don't tend to measure stuff, I'm more of a bodger then an engineer, my grandfather would be turning in his grave, all his scale models were fractions of a mm perfect.

 After hot glue gunning the base and trimming it in a rough ovalish shape I add chunks of the offcuts and fill with, er... filler.

 And that's it for the first night let the filler dry. You will hopefully notice that I have carved out the block shapes from the edges of the collapse.

 Speaking of which I then carved up the excess from the tower conversion trying to cut out individual blocks.

 These blocks are added to the base and PVA coated around them to stick sand and small stones to.

 The core of castle walls are made of rubble in a lime mortar. I've tried to recreate that look by carving out the centre of each wall and adding alot of model railway ballast.

 You can see the effect best from above. In the UK we are very lucky in having a great many castles, some in exactly this state and to my eye this is about right.

 The view from inside the fortress.

Here with a miniature for scale. The breach fits three 20mm bases. I'll make the second one bigger.

Now onto the keep in progress. Not much but I got the stairs modelled. from blue foam.

 

The white circle is some depron from a chilled pizza. The stuff is really great for bases. I've decided to make the stairs as a separate piece so I can choose to incorporate the keep into the fortress wall.

Mounted on it's base the stairs look pretty good in place. I can only stand miniatures at the top but I couldn't make the stairs look right with wider steps.

Converting the citadel mighty fortress.

With BOYL14  fast approaching it isn't just a new army I have promised to bring to the table. I've also promised at least a couple of mighty fortresses painted and including a few breached sections and perhaps a keep. This means taking a 2lb lump hammer and...well perhaps not. It does mean a well planned couple of conversions.

Luckily I have enough Citadel Mighty Fortresses to leave a few towers and wall sections going spare. Indeed that's why I collected three of them many years ago.

First lets tackle the Keep. The 1988 siege rules handily give us instructions on how to make a multi-section tower. Just two I feel is enough for a small keep, any more and I'm using more towers than I care to.


In actual fact the conversion isn't as obvious as the book makes it appear.  Trimming the parapet off one side of two towers doesn't do the job. This would leave holes where they are not required. To be honest I wasn't entirely sure how the towers would fit together and it was a matter of just diving in.  Any mistakes and I'd just have to wing it.

So I started slicing using an old bread knife and proceeded to cut at an odd diagonal. Never mind, press on.

  

 Next as suggested by the siege book I add cocktail sticks (or trimmed down skewers in this case, not enough martinis in the Erny house).

 

 Then whack them together with the hot glue gun. Looks OK, the gap for the lower doorway will be covered up by a set of stairs leading to the upper doorway.

 

So it looks OK from the top too. I usually sand the round mold makings off before painting so don't worry about that. My youngest, Wilfy has been handily pointing out the ones I've missed as i pain t the wall sections.

However sanding or no sanding I feel it's worth filling in the gaps. Now what do you us to fill in unsightly gaps and dents in your walls?

There we go then just a roof and a set of stairs to make. Easy, next time I'll detail the progress I've made making the breech. It's jolly good even if I do say so myself.

Helblitzen. Halberdiers for my 3rd ed empire army.

Every Empire army in 3rd needs twenty Helblitzen and here we have twenty two with a leader and champion. They are a mixture of old citadels collected over the years, about a third of them are foundry citadel re-releases. In some cases I have both the original citadel and the new foundry cast. I take all but a thin strip of the foundry cast bases off the new miniatures and use that as a slotta tab. This means even turning them upside down I have to look carefully to tell which are old and which are modern. 

Again this is my simple speed painting in action sticking to the yellows and purples so evident in  warhammer armies. This time I've even done some of the layers on top to tidy things up a little. Not much more effort and though far from the best of my ability I think this standard will do for BOYL14 as we only have a few weeks left.

I decided these would be the main professional body of the watch as they have good equipment  and harness. To that end I painted them more uniformly and made a nice banner depicting the city in purple and yellow.

We have two low level characters.

I just need to get the bases done on these now.

As to whats next in my current speed army frenzy.....

The knights of the flaming heart. Templers of Sigmar for my 80's Empire army.

Last post I showed a few halberdiers suggesting that this would be the next unit to be painted but I got distracted. I've had a selection of the 1988 Empire knights on giant plastic horses for years but never got round to painting them. Why I here you ask?  Because of the lack of barding on the horses. I've often thought about sculpting my own but lacked the courage, milliput or greenstuf on plastic has to be reasonably one way.

I could just mount them on the 1992 warhorses with barding. They are contemporary to 3rd ed but for me it just doesn't seam right. I know that those of you who use which ever great sculpt from which ever age or company must be rolling their eyes at the need to use 3rd ed horses of any kind, let alone the giant horses. We'll just have to blame it on the way my brain works and not over think it.

With BOYL14 fast approaching I decided to take the plunge. They are a little rough but they are not terrible. More importantly they seam right so I'm a happy lead head.

Only one is supposedly a templar but I like the winged helmets.

A big flag, hey it's fantasy.

I think I can get them a little less rough with a bit more sanding.

We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. Landestrum for my Empire army.

 Or oh there's some lovely filth down 'ere.

Ten days after finishing the basic paint job on the crossbows I've managed to finish the Landestrum peasants. A mix of original citadel and a few foundry re-releases. I've done a few weapon swaps to add some farm implements and to break up the all clubs vibe that was going on. The weapons are all from Essex miniatures and were available when these figures first came out. I know because I bought some at the time from the Guardroom in Dunstable.

I've always wanted a unit of these, pathetic aesthetic and all that. After playing Whiskey Priest's Brettonians I have a new found respect for human levys. Mind you his peasants had shields and spears, mine just hand weapons. There are so many scenarios where a mob of unwashed filth is just the ticket so really I had to get these done. Who knows they may even turn out to be stars on the battlements, throwing rocks and rotten turnips isn't that hard.

Scythes and picthforks from Essex miniatures turn beggars into sons of the land.

 You'll have someones eye out with that, oh, er..

The mob.

As I mentioned in my post about the crossbows, I'm speed painting here, base coat and shade. If I get time I'll go back and highlight before but certainly after BOYL14. They are far from perfect but they'll do at a pinch. To be honest I'm itching to get some layers on them they are so full of character. However I have other units to get done and I think less than two months now. Speaking of other units the next unit to get the speed paint treatment are these old perry halberdiers.

Empire Crossbows. Gettign ready for Bring out your lead 2014.

Having signed up to a big 3rd ed siege game for BOYL14 it is probably about time I got my units ready. I've decided to experiment with the dips that are available from a bunch of companies these days. The idea being to get the units finished in record speed. I've also decided to take the figures to base coat and washed (rather than dipped) first and moving straight onto an new unit. This doesn't mean they are finished, just gameable with, in case I fail to finish everything to more exacting standards.

Here is the first unit I've finished to the stage where I'm happy to move on but looking forward to go back and finish.

 Here we have eighteen crossbows, the three with plastic crossbows are from my original 1980's collection, most of the rest are original citadel picked up from ebay and the obvious ones are from the re-released foundry-citadel mercenaries.

 I have tried to give them a sort of uniform, purple and yellow which sort of follows standard colour on metal of the middle ages but keeps them distinct from Bretonian forces. I've also tried to keep them looking like a ragtag bunch with a mix of uniforms/personal choices. Obviously the majority of these are late middle ages not really Landsknechtes so I haven't gone for a riot of colour.

 The two guys in the middle here are the crossbow offerings available in the foundry citadel mercenary re-release packs. They were picked up at the first BOYL last year.

I've done some simple head swaps to get more variety. To find out where the heads went stay tuned!
I'm looking forward to getting back to these and doing the highlights to properly finish these but once the bases are done they are usable now and I still have a lot to do.

Speaking of which here is a single picture of the next unit I'm going to paint up to this stage:

BEF platoon for Chain of Command.

I have a lot of historical stuff, all sorts of periods, indeed when this blog goes quiet I'm often painting historicals. I've never actually shown any of my historics on this blog. I always intended to start Erny's other place for my historics but never did.

Three things have happened to make me change my mind. Firstly I thought why not put them on this blog now that the Oldhammer blog is up and running again and well the whole Oldhammer community is pretty strong I can stop banging on about it. Secondly I've really got into Chain of Command by Too Fat Lardies. I have painted up a platoon of BEF in 15mm. At this scale the games ground scale is 1:1 which for a WW2 game is pretty special. I have been working on some terrain too and had photographed a little setup to show you but hesitated over adding historics to this blog. Finally Orlygg went and posted historics today so why not.

These are Peter Pig early war. The last European theater British I painted were 10 years ago late war 20mm for Rapid Fire. I really enjoyed getting these done rather than stands of 15mm for FoW. I just need to get the Jerries done now.

I'd be happy to add more historic stuff if people are interested.