Welcome to my castle.
This project is the greatest and most challenging I’ve done so far. Actually it isn’t that big. Its even a bit off scale
comparing to the miniatures some manufacturers produce today.
The building measures 19 inch wide, 23 inch deep and the highest tower measures 19 inch. The river around it is about
9 to 10 inch wide As I said, the castle is not that big, it still took me 2 years to built.
For those of you who are interested, I will try to tell you as much as possible about how I made this castle,
what materials I used and some nice to know things that you might use on some of your own projects in the future.
But first some photo’s from this project before I start babbling about how I built it.
It started all with the big tower. I first planned to built a large watchtower using two round poster containers and stack
them onto each other. To make it more interesting I thought of adding some kind of structure to make the tower look more
irregular. So I added a square kind of tower to it. At that stage I decided to make a lower, middle and higher level in the
tower to put my miniatures on. The square tower and the walkways from the lower and upper level are made from foam board.
One thing leads to another so I decided to make the square tower look irregular too and made a kind of house left to it.
When I was thinking about how to make the roof, the idea of making a walkway on top of the roof was there that leaded me
to the decision to make a wall connected to the tower. I still thought about making a small piece like a tower with a house
and a piece of wall. To come to the roofs house I made the stairs on the opposite side of the tower. Because the stairway
turned out to become a long one I was forced to extend the tower at that side too.
Next I made the wooden railing on the three levels of the tower using small pieces of wood. The beam structures that hold
up the roof are also wooden parts. All planks of wood out of the hobby shop, mostly used for making ship models. The roofs
where quite a different story. I experimented and came with a nice but very time consuming solution. See my tips & tricks
page on "making roofs". The beam structure on the square tower was made using very thin planks of wood glued onto the foam
board.
The walls, stone structure on the walls as the doors and windows are also done in a certain way, please go and see my
tips & tricks page on "making walls".
The wall connected to the tower first got a railing as well. I thought about making a roof structure and soon after that I
got the idea of making a structure on which you could walk all around. The caste plan was a fact. I choose to make the round
about roof structure like you see in the photo’s in a way that you can reach your miniatures without too much trouble.
The roof is actually a half open structure. Also the corner sections of the walls are irregular The roofs of the corner
structure are removable, again for easy access.
Since a castle in my imagination has to have a moat I decided to make a kind of stream running through the castle’s
courtyard. A small entrance/exit coming from under the house and a large exit/entrance with a gate on the opposite site.
To suggest that there is a current in the stream I decided to built a small water mill into the stream. This was entirely
made out of foam board.
Important for this project is to choose colors that are consistent so the walls and roofs are all in the same color scheme.
The houses inside the castle are all painted in a same color scheme as well. Defense structures have black/gray walls with
copper roofs and urban structures have white/brown walls with green roofs.
The most testing part of the castle is the courtyard itself. How to make a tile pattern like this, looking like a kind of
mosaic. I made a drawing of how the ground patterns had to be and started to cut paper pieces of a very small size as seen
in the picture where I put my finger next to the cut paper. I spend several month glutting one square inch at the time and
used a needle to pin a piece of paper on it and glue it on the floor. This was a routine that I preformed over many
thousands of times; pin & glue, pin & glue, pin & glue, pin & glue………
The same goes for the bridge and the roof tiles.
When you look at the project in total you might have noticed that I made this castle in a very unusual way. All the towers
are built in the mid wall section while mostly you expect towers built on corner structures. The 4 towers are located
opposite to each other. Reason for this is also that I tried to keep the distance in between towers more or less the same.
Another thing is that they are all different in size and shape. The walls are also designed in this manner.
I did use some funny things in this project like earrings as steeples, table tennis ball as observatory, Brush hairs for
water plants, sand and gravel for walls and water structures, The lid of a pot of glue as a tower bell. Two plastic owls
you get when you buy bubble gum as statues at the bridge and the witch that was once my wives silver necklace
I am pleased with the final result but I will NEVER built such a structure again!!!
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