Warhammer Townscape challenge part 3: detailing the tower

With the deadline rapidly approaching, I snuck in a spare evening hour to detail the Townscape tower. After all: the glue has to have a chance to (sort of) dry when I start slapping paint on this thing in the coming weekend. With that said, lets throw out a quick update (and prevent a massive blog post later on).

The landlord's here to visit...

As I sat looking at my stone tower I briefly contemplated going ahead and cutting it apart to make the 'floating stone' tower after all. Luckily I decided not to follow that notion for now, but save it for some later project. Instead I glued a bit of paper to the inside of the hole. I'll paint that black and it'll stop bits and miniatures from falling into my building (probably nonsense, but I always worry about it). 

They're blasting disco down below...

Getting the door fittings right is rather important to make a believable looking door (and that sentence is what we'd call 'kicking down an opened door' in The Netherlands). Having made a gazillion doors for all the other buildings in the Townscape has gifted me +25 XP on that particular skill (or was that an x in front of the skill and a die roll to see if it increases after the scenario finishes? I can never quite recall what gaming system real life is based on). I cut a small strip of cardboard and made two equal parts for the hinges (and two smaller bits for the trap door). For the handle I cut of three small bits of plastic from a plastic modelling pipe. The first bit is the circle for the handle. The second bit I cut in half to make the fitting. The other half and the third bit are for the trap door. Let's move on to that part of the tower...

Says, "I'm doubling up the rent 'Cause the building's condemned...

Tadaa. I made the stone pattern in this floor before putting it in the tower. If only I had as much foresight when it came to making a hole for the trapdoor, the trapdoor itself and placing the entire floor in the tower itself. I think I vented enough about that oversight in the previous post. the wooden pieces in both the trap door and the door are bits of coffee stirrer. I find that cutting coffee stirrer bits in half makes for more believable planking (it takes it down from 5mm machine cut to about 2.5mm crookedly hand cut). The other trick is to exaggerate the gaps between planks (slightly). Otherwise you can accidentally cover the gap with glue while assembling the trapdoor making the hole thing look iffy. 

You're gonna help me buy City Hall"

I fought a small scale war with the polystyrene bit I cut out of the tower. At first I wanted to place the cutout on the base as a whole, but this just looked odd. Instead I had to cut the individual stones loose. At that point I realized I assembled the building by placing surfaces angled at 45 degrees together. cutting them loose made the stones fall apart at a 45 degree angle. It was not my one of my brightest moments in scale modeling* (and yet more proof that I do not hold any degrees relating to structural engineering). Luckily I needed to add sand and debris anyway. At this point I snuck in a small strip of polystyrene beneath the left side of the tower (looking from the door). I was a bit worried about getting sued for plagiarism by the good people of Pisa otherwise. Luckily sand covers this gap up as well. On a whim I decided to experiment a bit with sand. The white patches are very light grain shell sand, the darker sand is beach sand (from the beaches in Normandy no less) mixed with this are little bits of stone. This whole mess has to dry now, I'll follow up later by adding more sand to the sides of the base (and looking at it, I might need to bevel the corners a bit). All in all, I'm well on my way towards finishing this thing over the weekend. 

* Attempting to use aceton by pouring it in a plastic cup still rates as number one for now.**

With apologies for the lazy captions, song got stuck in my head while looking at the rickety tower. 

As I'm blogging anyway, here's a quick bonus shot of my progress on the A Billion Suns ships (made earlier). Detailing these is turning out to be a challenge by itself. I really should not waste these shots and just make a separate post about it. Bla, bla, bla, tease, tease, tease....

** I found the picture I made so I'd never forget that moment of idiocy....

PSA: do not use a plastic cup when working with acetone. I'd go with a "So now you know, and knowing is half the battle," but I suspect this action has pre-disqualified me from joining GI Joe.