Hi!

I thought I'd post a link to a miniature of Conwy Castle (in Wales) me and a friend of mine are building. It's slow going, but I'm sure we'll be done any month now

Unfortunately it's on facebook, and you need to be logged in to see them. I'll host them elsewhere, when I get around to it.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44007197623#/photo.php?pid=30299309&id=1087203602&ref=nf

If you got pictures of any miniature project you're working on, or have done, it would be fun if you'd like to share!

Cheers,
Greg

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Health comes first, Ale is health, Health often! (Hälsan kommer först, öl är hälsa, hälsa ofta!)

Finally got around to posting some pictures elsewhere, so everyone can see them (without joining FB).

Please keep in mind this is work in progress. I'll post more pics later, when we've gotten further along.
The miniature is based on Conwy Castle in Wales, a castle that still stands today, fairly intact.

Anders the Blonde, my building-partner, has so far done most of the work, since I've had too little time to put in.
I intend to make up for it with lots of nice buildings for the town, and boats for the river harbour.

We still need to figure out the best way to make the water look nice. We're thinking see-through plastic and paint
underneath, but it's going to be expensive, hard to work with, and smelly. If anyone has any tips, I'd be happy to hear them

The scale is for 25-30 mm miniatures. The total size of the board is 2x2 metres.

Oh, the stone work is done by hand in a material called foamboard, btw.

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Health comes first, Ale is health, Health often! (Hälsan kommer först, öl är hälsa, hälsa ofta!)

Very impressive work Greg.

I hope you will provide us with the details of your work. In example how to create the very good impressions of stone using foam board.

Take a look at these two sites that both provides materials for creating water

http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/
(Look under: Miniature & Model Colors -> Water & Stone )

http://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics. ... .cfm/Water


Regards,
Peter

This is an excellent model.

What is it for? Looking at it I wondered if it was for a demo game at some show.

My question for you, is how do you bend the foam board round to make the towers? I've never tried curved foamboard walls.

For water, I'd probably choose one of Peter's methods (I have used both sucessfully) for small areas - but it is probably too expensive with the amount of sea you have. Multiple layers of gloss varnish (now days liquid resins are used) is the old fashioned method. You can paint effects in the layers and add flock sand etc as you go to give the apperance of greater depth, and underwater scenery. Probably this is best for inland water rather than the sea. For seascapes, sculputered plaster which is well painted can work well - especially for stormy welsh seas and is a lot cheeper than the branded water products. The other idea of have read about but not seen is to use scrunched up clingfilm.

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··<SableFox>··
AKA Jonathan M Davidson

Amazing!

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"Your logic is flawless. But that doesn't mean you're right." - Tedd Good

Oh, and Greger forgot to tell you that this model will be featured on an IviniaCon near you soon

...

viewtopic.php?p=136901#p136901

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Anders Bersten, Kingdom of Sweden.
"Better to die at sea than as a cow in the barn"

Any chance you guys could tell us how you created this?

How do you bend the foam board without making it crack? How do you carve the finely detailted stonework? ... are just a few of the many questions such work give rise to.

/Peter

Sorry for the delay in replying, busy life lately

First of all, thanks for the tips about how to create water, we'll be sure to test those methods out. It's a lot of water, so we'll probably have to think up some not so expensive method, somehow.

For the towers, we use a 3 millimeter thin foam board (without a cardboard surface), to bend it more easily, and we glue it carefully with a special (expensive) glue that works well with the foamboard. It's a contact glue that needs to be applied on both the foam board and the round cardboard roll, and allowed to harden for a period of time (I don't remember exactly, but I think it was about an hour), then we carefully roll the foam board onto the round tower and let it dry up for (I think it was) 24 hours or more. I don't rember the brand of the glue, but I can check, if someone is interested. I know it cost us about 120 SEK (about 17 US dollars) per bottle, and we used quite a few bottles (maybe 4-5 for the towers). The reason I'm a bit hazy about remembering the details is because we've been building for quite a while, and the glueing took place a while back.

Glueing the flat surfaces for the walls is much more easy to do, and we use ordinary glue for woodwork (water-based, white when wet, invisible when dried) for that. I imagine almost any sort of cheep(ish) glue would work, since it's flat and fairly big surfaces glued together. For the walls we use thicker foam board, about 5 millimeters, glued onto an inner "skeleton" of foam board with cardboard surfaces, to give the structure strength. I'm sure we could work with cheaper materials, but we like to make it damage resistant, to hold up for transporting between game-cons.

To draw the stonework we use an ordinary sharpened pencil to draw the stones into the foam board (again without a cardboard surface). It's easy to do and it looks really great. At first we tried to carve the stones with a pointy object, like a nail or something, but it turned out that a sharpened pencil is much easier to work with, since it will only "dent" the surface, not tear into it (which slows down the work and offers more resistance).

It's still a slow process which takes a lot of time, but the result is well worth the effort.

The castle is being built to use at games conventions, Iviniacon will probably be the first (if we manage to get it done on time). We try not to speed-build the thing, since we build it because we like building, not necessarily to use it for gaming (though we will, eventually). We both got steady jobs, so it's hard to find the time for it, unfortunately, and it is very time-consuming. But fun!

If anyone has more questions, fire away!

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Health comes first, Ale is health, Health often! (Hälsan kommer först, öl är hälsa, hälsa ofta!)

How do you plan to transport such a large & precious work

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"...blogging is literary pole dancing."
Robin Hobb

I was going to say fantastic work...

But perhaps realistic work would be a better compliment

Just one question why conwy?

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Plots and schemes are the same thing..

It looks absolutely stunning - are there any cutaways so you can access the different levels or the interior?

I'm sure people have already seen these tutorials but just in case....

http://gidian-gelaende.de/Material_HP/W ... index.html

http://gidian-gelaende.de/Material_HP/W ... index.html

And for water effects this might help out:

http://www.modellmarine.de/index.php?op ... temid=4338

I'd love to see more pics as work progresses - why Conwy?

Regards
Malcolm

Greger is swamped IRL so I'd partially and as far as I know answer the question "Why Conwy?". It's cos' Anders Ivarsson, the second half wearing the mason's helmet for this project, have been to Conwy and that they have some extensive photage of the castle and surroundings.

The project looks brilliant, and being friend to both these gents, I can say that they build is absolutely world class (they beat even the best I have seen at Salute in London for example) -- they have a series of famous, within game con Sweden contexts, diorama's behind them.

I hope they will finish this behemoth for next IviniaCon, 2010.

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Anders Bersten, Kingdom of Sweden.
"Better to die at sea than as a cow in the barn"

Yep, Anders is correct about why Conwy! And thanks Anders for responding and the compliments!

Sorry for being slow to respond in this thread

Thanks for all your positive feedback, and for the great tips of methods and materials, much appreciated!
We will certainly experiment with the different methods how to best create the effect of water, since we'll be needing quite a lot.
That's probably the biggest challenge with this project, if that won't look good, then neither will the rest, I suppose.
But, I'm guardedly confident that we'll make it work. (Durn, did I type that "out loud"?)

The project has been... er... on pause... for quite a while now, due to busy busy stuff, but hopefully we'll start building again now when autumn is here (no more nasty summer with nice weather and outdoor activities - yay!)

There will be some interiors available for the hall in the castle, and other buildings there. Also in the part of town we're building there will be a tavern, for instance, with interiors. Possibly a church/temple too.

And the whole thing is built in a way so we can transport it in pieces. The castle walls can be removed to show the courtyards and make it more easy to play on.

cheers,
Greg

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Health comes first, Ale is health, Health often! (Hälsan kommer först, öl är hälsa, hälsa ofta!)