Château Böhnstadt

The Schultze-Böhnstadt army had mustered over their designated blog. I usually post the battle reports or give a more detailed account of the process of the troops' creation here. I have to admit I've ignored this during the most recent campaign of four battles. My posts are less frequent there - simply because I do a lot of other painting-related things and I can make a backlog of those so even when I'm burnt out, I can comfortably add new content to the blog in three-day intervals.

This post's focus is this new scratchbuilt piece, the summer residence of Princeps Erhard Berthold von Jazygia. The ruler of Schultze-Böhnstadt and a battalion of the 1st infantry regiment are included in the above picture to show the building's scale.

It has a 18cm frontage with a main building and two wings. The facade is rather too classical and therefore anachronistic for the 1760s, but I personally prefer this style over Baroque silliness. Most likely the good monarch supports my views and had the castle built accordingly. 

I originally wanted a large garden complex to go with the building, but then I decided against it to save my ever reducing plasticard source. I've bought a 2x1m piece in last September and I've still got the better part of a 40x100cm piece and lesser remnants of another. 

The building itself is made of paper. There is a 2mm indentation in the main front where the archways for the doors are: this part is formed of plasticard cut to shape and sanded. Not the most perfect solution, but it does not subtract much from the building's aesthetics. I've switched to plasticard over balsa wood in the last minute, thinking that for such a small piece and large gaps for the archways, balsa would be a b***h to work on based on my humble experiences. We may never know if I was right.

I have made sketches, laid out the plans and cut the shapes out. I've built my last similar houses so long ago I actually forgot how much I liked doing this stuff. I've had enough trouble with the roof, but I usually use eye measurements and a bit of guessing and get it right. The main building's rooftop was a tricky one, but it's actually made of only two separate pieces of paper, the small piece between the protruding sides and the huge one covering everything else.

When the walls and roof were finished, I added the windows (22 for the wings and 15 for the main building), then the columns. The columns are match sticks, the chimneys balsa wood. 

For the garden, I've created a pair of trees made from blue foam and two beds for grassy areas separated with more match sticks. The fountain is made from two coins and green stuff. It's supposed to be a seashell or somesuch.

I've used a Vallejo white primer, then a basecoat of VGC Scrofulous Brown on the walls. This is a colour I've come to like, looks great on white primer. I gradually added more white and a dot of brown to this, painting up many layers until the walls reached a cream color. The roof was painted with two layers of dark red and orange brown mixed together for that baked tile shade. When the walls dried, I painted the windows using VMC Saddle Brown and bright blue. I've highlighted the window panes adding white to the blue as I've run out of the Electric Blue I used for this before. The building's doors were painted with Saddle Brown and a final, brighter highlight was added on the columns.

The building's base was covered with wood glue and sand before the primer was added. I've used gradually brighter layers of brown to wet- then drybrush the appropriate colors. To give the looks of a walkway, I've drybrushed some of the garden area with VGC Wolf Grey.

Completing the castle took two days all in all, while working on the 6mm SYW figures in the evenings. The wood glue made the primer crack up although I waited for more than twelve hours to cover it. I used superglue to fix the larger pieces, but it could ruin the texture of the walls so wood glue was used to put the windows and columns on, this also gave me more time to reposition something if it slid off or was added in a wrong way. In the end, the second layer of paint was unharmed by the glue, which seems to dry very fast when mixed with sand, but watered down or used otherwise then painted on, it can cause trouble.

A second post will follow on the Schultze-Böhnstadt HQ with the Flossian Union's army parading in a few days.