Building and painting my Mighty Fortress (and about time too)

Way back in 1988 (when people still yelled at me to get off their lawn instead of vice versa) the Warhammer Siege expansion appeared for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. This 140 page book has rules for everything you'd ever want to do to take or hold fortifications. Alongside the book GW released a new terrain kit called Mighty Fortress. This is a polystyrene set of towers and walls to use in games of siege (and general battles of course). I got my hands on one almost thirty years ago. As it (often) goes with miniature (related) purchases it did not get painted as quick as I imagined when I got it. Long story short: just before Christmas last year (2018) I got this box out of the to-do pile and started planning.

The Mighty Fortress came in a big pretty box that has been sitting around looking big and pretty for long enough now.

Now you might start wondering how hard it can be to build and paint a fortress that can be pushed together out of the box and essentially requires you to paint grey, more grey, a bit of extra grey and then some dark grey to accentuate the grey. But there are some actual considerations to make (actually it could be that simple, but I why take it easy when you can make it difficult on yourself?). The set consists of four towers, four walls and two walls with gates. Now on to the hard question. Do I want to make a modular fort with walls that can be taken off as I game and they collapse, or do I want to make a solid looking assembled model. My first instinct (about two years ago) was to go modular. As polystyrene is rather fragile I bribed a DIY-store saw operator to make neat mdf bases for my walls and towers. I glued the bits on and it looked like this.

Luckily I don't keep records of projects I start and fail to finish.

By keeping things modular I could take destroyed wall parts of the table and I could even make rubble heaps with a similar sized base to replace them with. On the downside the walls would always look a bit disjointed and the set does not have enough doors to make the towers look good. Also, in my experience, a five to seven turn game never really features a lot of destroyed scenery (even when rules support it). From a practical standpoint I prefer great looking terrain supplemented by a counter that says 'destroyed gate' or 'collapsed wall', even though hand made destroyed terrain sounds cooler. So I abandoned my modular approach which meant I had to cut the hot glued wooden bases off my set.

The Keep fits twenty models on 25mm rounds on a rampart if you stick two 'volunteers' on top of the battlements.

Next up was the another conundrum. Which of the two option to assemble the fort would I take? To use the Castle Layout terms from Warhammer Siege I could go for 'The Keep' pictured above or 'The Border Fortress' pictured below.

The Border Fortress looks impressive, fits a lot of models and is impossible to store if you don't own a dedicated Warhammer mansion...

 There are multiple considerations to make here. First of the size of a wall element is 25 cm (10 inches) and a tower is 12 cm (4 inches) at its base. Even based at the smallest size possible the keep requires a 49x49 cm (18x18") base, the fortress clocks in at a whopping 49x74cm (18x28") base. For gaming purposes on a modern table the keep takes up one of the six tiles on the table, the fortress two (one third of the table!). After some thought I decided having fortifications dominate the table is actually rather apt. Also these days there isn't a lot of excessively large pre-made scenery of this kind around, so making the Mighty Fortress small seemed a waste. A bit of testing with models on the ramparts and towers showed that the larger version allowed units of twenty with both 25 and 32 mm bases to adequately defend the walls (and about two 40mm bases fit the towers). So I decided to go for a large Border Fortress.

Rule number one: always dry fit before you take a saw to the MDF...

Next up was a wholly different consideration. Where do I store a fortress based on a 49x74cm plate? Even worse I wanted to add a bit of extra room around the fortress so it would be even larger. The deepest shelves in my hobby room are 40cm deep and my IKEA Billy cases with display doors are 29 cm deep. I briefly entertained the notion of adding a small hook or hole so I could hang it on the wall like a 3D painting, but in the end I decided to make two halves. That would allow me to have a 37 cm  side. With a bit of  extra space for basing outside the wall this would make the base extend about 3 cm (a bit over 1 inch) of my deepest shelves. I can also use half a board for games where a more subtle bit of fortification is needed. After picking up a 4mm MDF board I set up the fortress halves and measured the first cut.

This will work as a base...

Next up was rounding of the corners of the base and, using an automatic sander, bevel the edges a bit. I took special care to make sure the two halves lined up well. No sloppy looking bases for this model (as opposed to a lot of my other work (don't tell anyone...)).

Look at me being all precise and stuff...

With the base complete I could glue the model to it, add some sand, splash on grey and done...or not. As I was planning around my fortress it became subject of discussion on the Oldhammer Community Facebook page. Someone asked tips for painting it and a long and detailed answer followed. Lucky me, now I had some hints and tips to work with (aside from 'never spray it with aerosol'). Before I got that far I first set to work on the base.

The outline of a fortress and the shadow cast by it's modeler.

First off I drew a vague outline of the fortress walls. I decided then and there that I really wanted an outer moat, even if it was only a very wimpy looking moat. I just like screwing around with water, I liked the thought of the solid walls rising from a smelly moat and for some reason I did not feel like just tossing sand against the outer walls and leaving it at that.

Air dry clay is a nice thing to have lying around if you make a lot of terrain.

With that decided I looked at some pictures of courtyards and discovered that quite a lot of them are just lawns or sand pits. Luckily cobblestone is also often used. I decided to go for a bit of a run down look on mine, mixing cobblestone, dirt and grass. I got some simple air dry clay and spread it over the base, more or less between the wall outlines.

I love working with my textured rolling pins by Green Stuff World.

Next I took my courtyard rolling pin from Green Stuff World and used it to add stone effects to the clay. These rolling pins are not large enough for an area this big, but that does not matter. I'm not trying to represent a freshly laid courtyard here.

Now there is a courtyard I can build a fortress around.

After adding clay to both sides and making sure the center halves still matched up I used the rest of the clay to make an upright edge around the base to fit the moat.

Step two: add paint....no wait there are about a thousand in between steps to take first.

Then - with the clay still wet - I made sure my fortress would still fit around the courtyard. It did (by taking away some exces clay).

If you work with stuff that has to dry, check the fit before it dries. Yes every idiot should grasp that concept, but I had to learn it the hard way.

Once again this is not perfection or anything approaching that, but for a worn down courtyard look you need a sloppy modeler of my caliber (or so I keep telling myself).

I see a few gaps on this model....

The next step in preparing my fortress for paint was working on the actual polystyrene model itself. I have to admit to rather sloppily gluing the towers together way back when, but aside from that the model had rather a lot of 'less pretty' bits on it. The towers themselves are basically puzzle pieces and you see the large rectangles on the sides where they fit together. The ramparts and tower tops are flat and on the towers you see the joins and (not visible on the pictures) there are small dots all over the polystyrene that will definitively show up during drybrushing. First off I used very fine sandpaper te take all most of the ugly dots off. Then I switched to much coarser sandpaper as the fine stuff did not do enough. After that I followed the Oldhammer group advice and rolled a ball of tinfoil all over the walls and ramparts.

Shifting Lands makes amazing gear for those of us with a hot wire cutting table.

To solve the flat ramparts and ugly tower tops I took my polystyrene cutter and cut flat 5mm sheets of a block of insulation polystyrene. I then cut these sheets down to the size of the tower tops and the ramparts. Then I took a green stuff roller with a nice texture on it and used another tool by Shifting Lands to add texture to the sheets.

Textured tower inlays.

I ended up with these tower top inlays.

Textured ramparts.

And here are the (almost) ready to use sheets for the ramparts.

Make a hole!

I then cut out a center for the towers to add the original hatches. I kept the square I cut out and glued it in place on the tower. This sank down into the hole that would normally fit the hatch making it very easy for me to put in the hatch in its new location with a right bit of depth.

I've got some feint memories as to how a part of this set got discolored, I think it was stored next to a heating pipe, but I'm not fully sure. It happened rather a long time ago.

Four towers hatched up. The top left one served as a 'how to properly fill the gaps guinea pig. 

The ramparts where next. Here I ran into a spot of trouble with the doors. With the extra 5mm of flooring I would have doors that obviously could never open. But (if memory serves) most castles have a step down (or up) towards doors anyway. I guess they had trouble with polystyrene way back when as well ;). I simply removed a bit of the textured floor to fit the front of the door. Problem solved. Rampart textured.

Ramparts textured. Check the background to check out the ugly tower sides.

This saved me about a million years of work drawing in stones with a pen. Quite nice for me as I now had an extra million years to spent reworking the towers.

Adding texture to polystyrene only requires a pen (I prefer clicky tops to twisty bottoms, but that's a whole other subject).

Yes I'm exaggerating. The ease with which you can add texture to a surface is one of the major advantages of polystyrene. It took a couple of hours working with a clicky top pen to draw stonework on all the ugly rectangles on the tower sides. Just a matter of following existing lines and my own fancies while listening to a nice audio book. Next I stuck all the pieces onto the base and went to work with wood filler.

Wood filler is here to save the day!

Not mentioned anywhere else in this long post, adding the doors to the towers required some pre-gluing with PVA and other light restorative work. 

To fill the gaps I tried some plastic putty first (expensive) and then I tried PVA glue (gravity turns out to work on PVA glue (who would've thought)). In the end I settled on wood filler because its cheap, easy to work with as you can smooth it out with water. I filled all the holes and gaps between the walls and towers. I took special care to redraw stonework that got hit by excess wood filler. That's trivial to do when its wet and a hell of a job when its set.

I'll fit the actual gate in at a later point in the project.

I also took a long look at my moat. This gate is way too near to the ground to have a drawbridge, but I can imagine the builders making a wooden bridge that can easily be destroyed if attackers come. Time to grab some balsa wood and cardboard.

Ok the bridge needs a little extra work after this...

I measured the breath of the bridge and made a too small version of it from cardboard.

Always keep a nice supply of balsa wood around the hobby area.

Next I cut enough 9 cm strips of balsa to make two bridges.

Balsa wood meet mr. scalpel. Balsa wood cuttings, meet mr. trashcan.

A very important step when working with ready to use strips of balsa wood: scoring the planks. It just looks better when painted.

Next step: add glue...

The components for the bridges are ready.

No thinking required at this point.

Add PVA glue.

Quick, easy and you can even fold them (more or less) after the glue has dried.

And the bridges are finished. Thanks to the bottom cardboard strip I can bend these to the right proportions when the fortress moat had been painted.

Restoring the gates. 

I also repaired the doors. As you can see one of these doors actually did get some sort of paint way back when. The other lost its bar somewhere in the mists of time. I plan to fix these to the fortress permanently so I added a quick and ugly new bar that will most likely never be seen once the project is finished and I glued the door pieces together with some PVA.

Keep a weather eye out for birds at this point...

Then I added PVA to all the areas my green stuff rolling pin had missed in the courtyard. The flat bits, the parts where walls and floor did not line up and the areas where the clay cracked while drying. After applying PVA I covered it with bird cage sand. I've gotten to the point where regular beach sand has begun to look too big on a model's base so I'm hoping this will look more subtle. Don't worry, I tipped of the exces sand after taking the picture above. I also 'sanded' the clay edge outside of the moat.

I hate priming with a brush, it takes forever and you always miss a spot.

With all these tasks finished, I could take a large soft brush and cheap grey paint to basecoat the fortress. I briefly considered taking the lazy route and airbrushing a primer, but on a model this size that's just not very economical. It took me two layers of watered down paint and a lot of serious searching and touching-up to get about 99% of the model covered in grey. Somehow there's always cracks and nooks you miss, no matter how hard you try.

Did I drybrush or overbrush? Still not fully sure. 

Next I started to slowly add layer after layer of drybrushed lighter greys on the fortress. Here's a shot of half one with extremely subtle grey drybrush and half two with another layer. After the fortress walls where satisfactorily grey I painted everything that looked like sand with a base layer of burnt umber paint. I also painted the moat with a green through which I tried to wet blend a bit of blue. Yes we are still working with cheap as hell paints here. I might as well mention that I used a very cheap make-up brush for all the drybrush work. These brushes are huge (from a modelers perspective) and actually make better drybrushes then the expensive ones you can buy tailormade for our hobby.

I should've been in bed sleeping around this point.

The courtyard still needs a lot of work (as does the rest of the fortress).

And here we are so far. The modeling work on the fortress itself is done and basic layers of paint have been applied. Next up I'll have to drybrush the sand, work on the moat, add effects to the walls and flock and tuft bits of the base (still dreaming about going for an old school style flocking, will probably chicken out). I'm also planning to build four themed hoardings to go atop the gate and maybe a few courtyard buildings. As I see it, this fortress is a perfect neutral background for any faction and I suspect a themed hoarding will make it easy to give it an Order, Death, Destruction or Chaos look. But let's finish this first and see for how long I can translate my enthusiasm into actual finished add-ons for this project, there are more models to paint on my table after all...

The gate measures 60mm on the inside and can easily fit 40mm and 50mm square bases. Three models based on 20mm squares should be able to provide a defense.