As you saw in the last blog post, my army for Throne of Skulls, 1,000 points of Atop the Walls, was complete. What I now needed, was a display board…
Having decided some time ago that I wanted to expand my Realms of Men army into Atop the Walls, the only logical display board for the army was the walls of Minas Tirith. An initial idea was to simply have the top of the wall as the base of the board and just arrange the models on it, but that would be too easy for Throne of Skulls [although having worked on my display board, it would have been a far more sensible option…]. Instead, I went with something a bit bigger…
My starting point for the project was, perhaps surprisingly, not the walls themselves. I wanted to try and recreate the scene from the films where Mordor's siege towers assault the walls. Unfortunately, Games Workshop doesn’t make a siege tower model [although it did used to make one for Warhammer Fantasy about 20-odd years ago, but they're very difficult to get hold of], and I don’t really have the skills to craft one. So, I did a quick search on eBay, and in a staggering display of luck, managed to come across a listing selling this beauty:
This tower comes from a range of action figures released alongside the films, and after placing some models on it to test the scale, it was the perfect size to use for the board! Now I just needed to build some walls to match it in terms of scale!
For the walls themselves, I had two choices – either scratch build them, or 3D print them. I'd used 3D prints for my Grand Tournament display board, but decided this time that I wanted to have a go at crafting the walls, especially once I'd worked out how tall they needed to be.
The basic structure of the wall was built from foamboard – this would be my inner layer, and was essentially a big box. I also made sure to make some supports to give it some sturdiness – I would be placing two metal trebuchets on it after all. As to the walls themselves, I used XPS foam sheets, into which I carved a brick pattern – I really do need to give a shout out at this point to ZorpaZorp and his excellent tutorial on How to Carve Realistic Stonework. Essentially, you mark out the lines for the stonework, score them with a craft knife, widen them with a pencil and then add texture to the foam by using scrunched up tin foil - the end result looked fantastic!
With the stonework carved, it was just a case of glueing the XPS foam to the foamboard box, taking care where the bastions were on end of each wall. The crenelations were made by using a hot wire cutter and a special MDF cutting jig I found online – this made things so much easier, and they looked great!
With the wall under construction, I needed a way for my army to reach the top of the wall – stairs! Whilst I could have also carved these from foam, it would have been very fiddly, and would've taken ages. Fortunately, the Gondor Mansion kit comes with a set of stairs – I'd saved two stair pieces from a previous project, and bought two more Mansion kits, so that I could use the stair pieces and then use the rest of the kits for future projects.
I started with a simple set of stairs, made by gluing one set on top of another (with a spare floor tile so that the stairs could actually sit on something), plus two floor tiles to create a landing where the stairs change direction – I then cut some foam sheets to size and glued them around the stairs – my stairway was complete!
Now to the section behind the walls themselves – I didn’t want it to just be empty, so I took one of the Gondor Mansion kits to use as a building. The design I had in mind was one I'd seen crafted a few times, and I wanted to see if I could replicate it using the kits – and I'm very please to say that I could!
Next came the siege tower, which I needed to look less like a toy and more like an actual siege tower – I used thin strips of balsa wood, glued to the inside of the tower to avoid there being bare surfaces – I then added extra platforms to the tower, making it look more to the scale of the models, and two support struts running up the inside of the tower. I had planned to convert two trolls to be pushing the tower towards the wall, but had to abandon that part of the project as I simply didn’t have time. After a bit of work, the tower was ready for painting!
So, to painting the board itself. For the foam, I first applied a coat of foam primer (i.e. paint that you apply to foam before spraying it so that spray paint doesn’t melt it) – I used a white spray paint, before picking out individual bricks with different colours in order to give the stonework some variety. I then applied a wash of Contrast Apothecary White over the whole thing, before drybrushing everything with Pallid Wych Flesh. Finally, the White City was indeed white!
The mansion kit got the exact same treatment, before it was glued into place. I then added some scatter terrain I'd scavenged from my GT board, and the city itself was ready! I then added sand and flock outside the walls, painted to match my Pelennor Fields basing scheme – the board was almost ready!
As to the siege tower, I used different metallic paints for the various panels, such as brass, bronze and silver, before applying a wash of thinned down Contrast paint, before lightly drybrushing the edges with a dark silver. The wood was painted with the same wash, before being drybrushed with light browns – I then painted the flags at the top of the tower and it was ready!
Last but not least, I needed some orcs to assault the white city, and for that, I picked up a sprue of Morannon orcs. I sprayed them black, then silver, before applying two washes - first black, then brown. This is my go-to recipe for dirty metallics – orcs aren’t going to have shiny armour after all. The cloth was picked out with brown, before being highlighted with a dark red and then a lighter red – I kept the colours fairly muted so that they would stand out against the bright walls. I then picked out the skin with greens, browns and greys, before painting the weapons a light brown – with the orcs glued in place on the tower, the board was finished!
So, here is the finished board, with the army added! I was really pleased with how this board turned out, and as it was mostly constructed from foam, it wasn't overly expensive either! It looked great with the models all set up on the walls – I then paired it with Sam's army and display board, and we were ready for Throne of Skulls!
So, to the event itself – as usual, it was a showcase of incredible hobbying. The standard seems to get higher and higher every year. Sadly, my army wasn't nominated for Favourite Army, which ultimately was my goal, but having seen the incredible armies and their display boards which did get nominated, I can have zero complaints – they really were stunning pieces of work, and all of them deserved their nominations – the event organisers must have one heck of a task trying to come up with their shortlist.
As to my numbers, the model count for this year has now reached 178 models! I've been really pleased with my progress this year, and I'm hoping that with a bit of a push, I can get to 200 painted for the year. Post Throne of Skulls, things get a little bit more relaxed as I have no upcoming events, but I'm looking forward to seeing what Secret Santa may bring!
I'll be back with one more post this year, which will be my usual end of year round up – until then, hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!
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