Disaster strikes the Mighty Fortress

Let's start this post with a quote from the latest AoS rulebook: "One of the greatest joys of collecting Citadel Miniatures can be found in the modelling and painting of your collection as you assemble and recreate all of the great heroes, terrifying monsters and amazing landscapes of the Age of Sigmar." I'll be keeping that in mind as I continue posting on the Mighty Fortress project. It took a slight turn this week and ended up in 'horror show county'.

I still think it's a fine looking moat.

It started quite well as this photo I teased on my last post shows. After going through the build phase and drybrushing most basic colors on the fortress it was time to start work on the moat. So I thought about one of those hard questions (for modelers): what color is a moat? We all know it is not blue and to be quite honest my instinct would be to go for blackish brown. But that would look dour and it would not contrast with the walls. So I went for option b: a green/brown/blue mixed together in a color I will dub (in honor of GW color names) Miasmic Moat. To paint Miasmic Moat you need to channel your inner expressionist and just emote your sense of moat onto the scenery.

How to paint a moat? Just grab a bunch of colors and go wild...

To start with I painted the moat in a random dark green, then I watered down a random ochre brown and splashed it around. I followed up by dipping a brush in a random blue and smearing it through the center of the wet brown.

...flatten it out a bit...

Next I used a big brush to sort of blend the blue into the brown. As I can't really blend, I tried desperately to keep a slightly darker color in the center of the goopy brown mass. I also pictured a friendly Bob Ross telling me there are no mistakes and realized once again that painting scenery gives you a great excuse to learn techniques by simply going wild.

...go wilder still...

As I found the brown a bit boring I went really wild and just added dabs of colors lying around to the still wet mess. If you ever feel the stress of a long day catching up to you, I can recommend this style of moat painting, mistakes are impossible to make, so relaxation is guaranteed.

...flatten it out again...

I 'blended' the (bright) color spots into the larger goopy mess. And allowed this to dry. Luckily this flattened out the obvious brush strokes and made Miasmic Moat quite a succes (in my humble opinion). It is a brackish green/brown moat color if you ask me. Still something was missing. To do something about that, I reached for the airbrush.

...and finish it off with some random blasts from the airbrush.

I used a few random watered down colors to airbrush a bit more blue into the brown moat. I also mixed the by now utterly filthy water from the brush cleaning pot with a bit of Vallejo Black Wash to darken the bottom half of the fortress. After that I used more of the filthy water mixed with a drop of Vallejo Cam. Green to fade the black into a greenish tint. I finished by very neatly applying GW colors to paint the doors, hatches and (off screen) the gates and bridges.

Admittedly the resin did look very good when it was freshly poured.

So far, so good. I really wanted the moat to look nice, so I took a two component kit of epoxy resin and mixed batches to make the moat look real. Here's a proud shot just after adding the 'water' to the moat. Little did I know, but my stressfree time of joy was over.

A flood! Oh no this hobby is triggering national trauma's!

The first sign that I had not taken enough time to think things through, was an invasion of water into the courtyard. I had forgotten to seal the space between the plastic bottom of the gate and the moat.

Is it too soon to add a bridge? Yes it was, but I still did it anyway...

Being Dutch with some ancestry hailing from Zeeland (luctor et emergo for the win) I immediately stemmed this unwanted invasion of water by building a dyke out of blue-tack. I also couldn't resist quickly adding the bridges to the model. This has no relation to the trouble with the epoxy resin, but might help explain why there is a bridge in the center of this picture.

This is a dumb way to stop epoxy resin.

Quite unfortunately (yes, I knew at the time it was dumb, but I couldn't stop myself) a pathetic strip of masking tape is not enough to stop epoxy resin. 'Luckily' I got so carried  away with this project I did not even put a garbage bag under the second half of the fortress. Leaving me with this sticky goop on my work surface.

Yes, that really did not work.

I took a deep breath, opened a bottle of Acetone and started cleaning.

On the bright side, my workspace needed a good scrub. 

Next up was a long wait (I figured) for the resin to cure. For those of you thinking 'that wasn't such a horror story', you are right. The horror is about to begin. Strap in...

This picture was taken as I was starting to get worried.

After two days of curing my moat was still wet. A very much wished for condition in a real moat, but one not sought after in a Warhammer moat.

It's been two days! Why won't you cure!!!

On day three I decided it might be due to too little heat. So I propped the tacky goop filled moat above a radiator and hoped for the best. I shouldn't have. 'Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment', is still my favorite Warhammer related quote and very much apt here.

This is looking very, very wrong indeed. 

Aside from being too cold (and it wasn't), epoxy resin failing to cure has two most likely causes. First a wrong mix of hardener and resin. As I used scales I'm quite sure I got this right. Second a bad mix. As I got rather carried away and it looked so nice and transparent, I'm quite sure this is where I went wrong. I failed to properly mix the two components. Now if I had used a small test piece first, I could've found this out the easy way. But, well let's just say that's not my style. The internet has a lot of tips for dealing with sticky epoxy resin. Unfortunately all of them can be boiled down to 'scrape off what you can, and retry'. Apparently if you cover goopy epoxy with solid epoxy it can leak through. I'm not going to find out the hard way if it that is true.

'Ripened for 6 months' ? Is this bottle of white vinegar pretending to be for gourmet chefs?

So I picked up a bottle of white vinegar as this can (according to the internet (and when has that ever been wrong? (don't answer that!))) take the tackiness of epoxy. Hey, it's better then using acetone near polystyrene and acrylic paint. I also grabbed a filling knife, a roll of kitchen towel and a rag. Then I started scraping.

If you can watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools. 

Large parts of goop could just be taken off. The vinegar actually did seem to help with cleaning and unsticking the mess slightly. Mind you: this will not fix bad epoxy it just helps (slightly) with the cleanup.

And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

I went through a full roll of kitchen towels, about three pairs of latex gloves and it took around two hours but finally most of my moat is now free of uncured epoxy. It still sticks a bit but its better then it was.

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! (okay the Kipling may have been a bit over the top, but I really needed some extra captions ;)

Unfortunately the cleanup took strips of the paintwork with it as well. A few parts did harden properly (and won't come off) so fully repainting the moat is not an option. Instead I'll have a go at fixing the broken bits of paint. Considering the process I used to paint it, I'll just have to get creative with the fix. If you fall of your bicycle (sorry, did I mention I was Dutch?) you have to climb right back up on it and try again. The same applies here. A fresh Epoxy resin kit has been ordered. This Mighty Fortress will be completed! (Insert howling mad laughter here).

Let's end with a quote from the current Warhammer 40K rulebook: "In truth there is no right or wrong way to go about engaging with the Warhammer 40,000 hobby – it’s best to just find what you most enjoy and go for it." Wise words to take to heart, although I beg to differ slightly about there being no wrong way to engage with the hobby. I would advise everyone not to engage it with badly mixed epoxy resin. Now back to enjoying this wonderful hobby.