Over the last weeks I worked on another old project. After more than 10 years I finally started painting the Ruined Cathedral from Armorcast. This is a fantastic model with lots of details. The casting quality was very good too - no airbubbles and the bottom already sanded flat. I bought enough parts to built a big cathedral with main- and sideships.
Back in 2002 I shot the pictures above. I intended to built an exalted place from wood, to structure the surface with pieces of cork and to glue the model on top. Now I am glad that didn't executed that plan. Nowadays I want to have the pieces modular for greater flexibility (for gaming, storage and exhibition). Aside from that my skills in painting buildings increased over the last years with my growing experience and new learned painting technics. In my eyes this model deserves the highest paintingstandard to match the brilliant modelling quality.
I restarted the project by gluing 2 wallpiece
together at a time with 2 component glue. I did this for better handling and stability.
The model still needs lots of rubble to look as a recently collapsed (and burnt out)
building. Only one small pile of rubble can be bought from Armorcast so I had to built
this myself. Back in 2002 I built 2 molds and recast some of the undamaged wallpieces from
plaster. Three of this casts had been beaten into pieces with a hammer. Woodglue was
generously applied in different sized patches on the sticky side of some adhesive foil. I
also put the walls on the foil and added some woodglue (Ponal) next to the lower parts.
The bigger pieces of the smashed walls were carefully arranged with the "nice
side" up on the woodglue. Next I sprinkled the smaller pieces and some sand to
the glue. After two days of drying I cut the foil around the walls and the rubble.
Pictures with the results of this stage can be seen in the pictures above.
The next step was to prime the models. I used two spray cans with acrylic color from the DIY shop. The first color sprayed on was a dark brown. I tryed to cover every part of the models with this color, especially from below. The second color was a kind of sandcolor. This time I only sprayed downward, The result was a good groundcolor for the further painting and the first impression of shadows with the dark brown still visible in some areas.
The next step was to drybrush the whole models with a very light beige. The emphazises the details very good.
Then the whole models got a wash with a thin brown mix of AERO COLOR Airbrush Colors from Schmincke (black, umbra and burnt sienna). In the middel picture you can see one wall with (left) and one without (right) the wash.
After the wash was dry, I once again gave a careful drybrush with the light beige to the models. I was very stisfied with the three-dimensional effect, but the color of the stones was a bit to equable to look realistic.
To add some variety I decided to give some parts of the cathedral a burnt out look. For this I drybrushed the areas with black acrylic color. In the picture above you can see me first testpiece. I also added some more soot with black and little ashes with white dry pigments for an even more realistic look. For the other models I skipped the use of the dry pigments for later and proceeded with the next job step.
In this step I colored single stones with thin washes. I used again the airbrush colors from Schmincke in the tints black, umbra, burnt sienna, ochre and olive green. This adds much varity in color tones and makes the look of the models more realistic. The blocks of sandstone on real buildings never have exactly the same color.
The final touch is the addition of some broken leaded windows and some pieces of the broken multi-colored glas on the window ledge and floor. Armorcast sold matching windows printed on overhead foil. I cutted these with a sharp scalpel and glued them into place with superglue and thinned down woodglue. Pictures of the first testpieces can be seen above.
The cutting and especially the glueing of the broken windows for the 48 windows was a real pain. It took me more than 5 evenings to do the job. After the glue was dry I added some pigments in different sand colors to dust the glasses and to remove the shine left from the glue. I also gave the remands of the glas next to the burnt areas a black wash.
With this last step the model was finally finished. It took e more then 50 hours but I am very happy with the result.
Here comes the pictures of the finished pieces:
So I get this project finished finally and I hope you like it too. I will add some pictures of this pieces together with miniatures and other terrain pieces in a few weeks.
To be continued ...
