Monday 23 November 2009

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.


4 comments :

  1. Lovely castle. Any tips for doing it in 10mm? I asume that the general concept is the same, but how would detailing be handled?

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  2. To be perfectly honest, I've never tried building anything in 10mm, and this is only my second 15mm project. You could try the cardboard rectangle stone block technique with smaller rectangles and possibly use a finer grade of textured paint, or none at all. I'm really not sure how things would look in 10mm.

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  3. Do you have the sizes of the shapes that were on the plan

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  4. I'm not really sure if I have the plans anymore. I've moved house since then. From memory, the PVC pipe used for the towers was 40mm or 50mm. I'll try to take some measurements from the actual castle and post them here. Most of the time I do things by eye rather than working out exact scale, so I've really just gone with what looked right to me.

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