For those that don't know, this project is to design a modular model castle out of chipboard in such a way that all of the component pieces--towers, outbuildings, wall segments, etc.--would nest into the 'main box' of the keep, thus making it easily portable and storable.
I also decided to eschew using realistic modeling techniques to disguise the bare chipboard surface, opting instead to take advantage of that surface and illustrate all of the castle textures by hand in a style heavily inspired by Warhammer Townscapes.
First, to give you an idea of the scope, here's the whole set laid out after I constructed it, painted it, and applied black ink (more on that later):
The component parts are:
- -The Main Keep (a 9" cuboid that holds everything else)
-The Balcony Wing (can be placed as a wing against the keep, or can stand alone as a tower house)
-4 x long wall segments
-4 x short wall segments (these and one of the long segments are constructed to slot into the 3 other long segments for storage)
-1 large open tower
-1 large roofed tower
-1 medium open tower
-1 small turret
-1 tiny turret (all the turrets and towers nest one into the other, like matryoshka)
-1 roof piece
-1 stable/house outbuilding
-2 small shed/house outbuildings or wall hourdings
-1 gatehouse
-2 stairways
-1 raised courtyard (aka the lid to the 'keep')
The other boxy structures pictured to the right side of the table above are actually just extra boxes I made to hold my other terrain and to use as test pieces for the illustration process.
At this point I had constructed everything out of heavy duty chipboard (super cheap from Blick here: https://www.dickblick.com/products/all-purpose-chipboard/; I used the 30-ply, but I almost certainly could have gotten away with the 14 ply. This stuff is thick.) At this point it is all coated in white acrylic to form a base for the illustration and I was starting to apply black fountain pen ink to form random shadows.
More to come tomorrow!