Box Castle I

Before I was even completely finished illustrating my horribly documented BOXVILLE TOWERS terrain project, I already had the beginnings in my head of the idea for a fantasy version.

Because I live in an apartment and usually have to drive somewhere else to game, I've long been focused on portability and modularity in my terrain. I've also always wanted a castle.

"Hmmm..." methinks. "What is a castle keep but a big box, mostly? And what if all the pieces of a castle terrain set could be made to fit into that box? And what if I illustrated the surface instead of modelling it, so I wouldn't have to worry so much about it getting damaged?"

That was the concept for this design, which I started almost three years ago now. The next few posts will show some of the details of its construction.

The build uses this 30-ply chipboard, which is very heavy duty indeed. Almost certainly overkill. Cutting all the pieces for this thing definitely took a toll on my knife arm.

Above you can see the pieces for the modular walls. They are designed to slot into each other like vhs tapes, with enough room inside to store peripherals.

The full set includes: 4 full-length wall segments; 4 half-length wall segments; 1 large castle wing/freestanding tower house; 1 large roofed tower; 1 large battlement tower; 1 small battlement tower; 1 small tower topper; 1 tiny tower topper; 2 outbuildings that can double as hourdes; 1 gatehouse; 2 stairs; 1 roof section for the top of the keep; and the lid of the box which can either be used as a raised court or as a footprint for the interior of the keep.

You can see an early assembly of most of these pieces here:

And here's how they fit into the keep box:

Once I had all the pieces together, I slapped white acrylic on everything as a base for the illustration of the surface textures. Then I started laying in shadows using fountain pen ink and water.

By floating this specific ink in pools of water (similar to wet-on-wet watercolor painting) you get beautiful granulated textures.

Using a spray-bottle gives you even more interesting textures.

Letting pieces dry on an angle let's you manipulate the shadows to the bases of the structures.

They dry like this:

I can, and have, hypnotized myself gazing at these textures.

Here's the whole set, as well as some terrain storage boxes I made as tests, in white with shadows:

 Next post, I'll show how I added colors!