Castles in the Air

For some time now we’ve wanted to produce some tiny castles for the Small Scale Scenery range. But it took a while to work out exactly what form they would take – a brief investigation showed that there was no such thing as a ‘generic’ castle, they’re all very different and generally built to suit the terrain around them. We could make one-piece models of specific historical castles, but there are so many to choose from and regardless of how many we made, we’d never be able to cover enough variations to please everyone.

So instead we’ve settled on making a series of castle components – we’ve designed a numbers of sets of walls, towers and gateways along with a couple of keeps. Hopefully that will give enough variations to produce a decent representation of most UK castles and some continental ones. The parts are all cast in our usual cream-coloured resin so should be easy to cut and modify (certainly easier than metal pieces !).

To give you an idea of what the pieces look like, I’ve put together a simple square castle with a keep; this was made on a 6″ square of acrylic, with the keep raised on a low motte made from foam card. It took no more than half an hour to assemble, and painting was a simple matter of spray (grey primer), wash (Citadel Nuln Oil) and drybrush (GW Longbeard Grey).

I’m still knocking the last gremlins out of the casting process (we’ve recently invested in some new pressure casting equipment which I’m still getting to grips with), but hopefully they will be available at Crisis in a couple of weeks.