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Tabletop World Guard Tower

The rule for the Bunkerettes this year is simple: finish old projects, don't start new ones.

I broke the rule.


Oops.

In my defence, there was a UK webstore selling Tabletop World's Guard Tower for a reasonable price, which meant no epic wait for the thing to come all the way from Croatia, and no chunky VAT charges. Furthermore, said UK retailer (http://zealotminiatures.com) only had one left in stock. My sweaty little fingers could hardly whip out my credit card quickly enough. I know, I know... I've got problems.

Having broken The Rule, it became a matter of honour that this 16" architectural wang should get painted damn fast. As soon as I finished my Frostgrave warband, I stuck to a rule of doing at least one stage on the tower every evening. This often meant spending only fifteen minutes painting, so I didn't get daunted by the hugeness of the building and just plugged away at it for a month in little bitesize chunks. 


At last I finished, and proudly plonked it in the light box for photographing. At this point a logistical problem emerged: sometimes a gentleman's tower is just too meaty for the box in question.


Well this is awkward.

Well-intentioned yet sleazy lothario for scale. Thanks, Oskar.


Like the other buildings I've had from Tabletop World there weren't any bubbles in the resin, and aside from the standard wash in warmish water, no preparation was required. The only gripe was that there were some moulding issues on the corners of the roof which, unless I were to spend a long time with some sculpting putty, would have been impossible to clean up without damaging the surface details. Given that I can just about see the same thing happening on Tabletop World's own paintjob, I'm assuming this is just a byproduct of this being one of their earlier sculpts.





Painting was simple enough; a basecoat drybrush of the same grey-brown emulsion I used on my Realm of Battle board ensures one has sourced local stone, after which I drybrushed a variety of greyish mixes on individual bricks to achieve some tonal variation (ding!) before tying it all together with a light grey highlighting drybrush. The wood was just a three-stage drybrush from dark brown to bone, and the verdigris on the roof was achieved by basecoating dark silver, then bronze (it needs the silver since bronze is pretty transparent), then brown ink, then nihilakh oxide, which is something I cannot thank GW enough for producing.


Given the texture, I suspect they made the plaster out of actual plaster.


Again, like other TW buildings, this thing has interior detail. The tower's floors are held in place by sockets in the sculpt, and it seems reasonably secure so long as no-one elbows it mid-game. The join between the ground floor and the first floor is surprisingly hard to spot:







It's fair to say I was pretty lazy about painting the interior--I imagine it won't see the light of day that frequently--but I can always go back and fill in the details if it ends up bothering me.

There's other stuff TW do that I'd love to get; the ruined townhouse would be perfect for Frostgrave and fantasy battles alike, but I really must move on to the next thing on 2017's hit list: the ships of the next Battlefleet Gothic campaign.

At some point we should probably get a photo of all the TW buildings the Bunker's members have accumulated. At this point it's a decent-sized village... possibly even a very small town. It's alarmingly close to having a collection of dollhouses. MANLY DOLLHOUSES.

~Charlie

Comments

  1. Looks great, doesn't break the rule if it doesn't add to the to-do pile.... I've a similar FW Necron Tesseract Ark which broke my own rule too

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    1. Thanks Siph! I can 100% understand how a tesseract ark might have tempted you onto the slippery slope :D

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  2. Looks great!

    Thankfully I have managed to steer clear from this hit of resin crack . . If I started with their stuff it could finally break the bank.

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    Replies
    1. Too true, their stuff isn't exactly the budget option!

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