Ishoo Eleven Point Fiv: Pretty Pictures

It seemed a waste just posting the in progress pics of the castle, so here are some pretty pictures with my freshly painted 15mm normans. Enjoy!

Ishoo Eleven: 15mm Castle

Well, here it is Hippo fans; the Castle; quite possibly the most spectacular single building any fantasy or medieval wargamer can build. This one is 15mm scale, a scale which is very good for large buildings as it is small enough for them to be practical, but large enough to allow detail work. 15mm scale is 1.8 times smaller than the 28mm scale used in many games, and it's amazing how much difference this makes to the foot print of a building. Incidentally, all the techniques used here could be scaled up to 28mm scale easily enough; you'll just get a much larger model in the end.
Take it away, Grot!


































Well, there you go!
It's hard to list exact sizes for the parts as a lot of it was done by eye and modified during the building process to get it to fit properly. The round towers are made from 50mm PVC pipe, the wall walks are about 24mm across and the keep is 100mm square.

Who said wargames weren't educational? I was invited by a colleague to talk to her year seven HUMS (Humanities; History, Geography and Economics) class about castles and model castle building, so I took this one along. At that point it was completely assembled, but not yet texture painted. I took a few other items from TFH along as well, and managed to keep an all boy class interested enough that they didn't talk for fifty minutes.

Anyways, next ishoo will be Twelf A and will feature Missile silos. The one after that will be Twelf B and feature polystyrene boats. Don't blame me; the poll was a tie.

UPDATE:

I've had a request via comments for dimensions. It's not easy getting measurements from a completed model, but I've given it a shot and got some rough meassures. Hope it helps anyway.

The Ishoo Twelf Poll

You may have noticed that the Ishoo Twelf people's choice poll is a tie.
So we'll be doing both. Ishoo Twelf A will be missile silos, Ishoo Twelf B will be boats.
None of which will happen until after Ishoo Eleven anyway, but I thought you might want to know.

Ishoo Ten: Orky Dropship

This ishoo we look at an item which not only works well as a piece of terrain, but could also be used as part of your army, given the right scenario; the Orky Dropship. The beauty of scratchbuilding orky vehicles like this is that the orks themselves never do a great job of building them, so any little mistakes you make just add to the character of the model!
Take it away, Grot!


*PTFE stands for Polytetraflouroethylene, or Plumber's Tape For Everything. You can buy it from any hardware shop.



Well, there you have it! For this example Grot and I used a 120mm polystyrene ball, but you can get much bigger ones, up to atleast 200mm diameter. I used one of the large ones to build this crashed Ork Dropship several years ago.
I entered it into the Starship Modeler 'Wrecks' contest of 2007; you can see details here.

Stay tuned for Ishoo Eleven in which we'll be building a 15mm castle for educational purposes (no really!), and while you are at it, vote for the next reader's choice ishoo, which will be coming up in Ishoo Twelf.
See you then Hippo fans!