The weather in my area has, in the last week or so, made a very quick shift towards fall. This has got me wanting to see decorations out and about, watch scary movies, and dig through my bins of figs, looking for Halloween miniatures. That being the case, it’s hard to go wrong with this large Candle-Jack from North Star. I put him together and got his base goop slapped down.

I then remembered I had two of his smaller brethren, so put them together and gave them some earth goop, too. I may or may not have forgotten to take pictures of that, though, before slapping paint on all of them.

One of the smaller fellows, before I decided to change his weapon (and glowing eyes color):

Modern plastic sculpts are really nice, but metal figs just have character to them that plastic doesn’t capture.

I’m hoping to use these in Frostgrave at some point, but regardless of whether they see play, I’m happy to have them painted up.

A few years ago, I was getting into Warhammer: The Old World, so was often scouring eBay for things related to it. One of the things I was on the look out for was the classic Warhammer mighty fortress:

Thankfully, I was able to grab one¹ – the plastic re-release of the kit, not the original late ‘80s polystyrene one. It was already assembled and primed, but in a peculiar mix of black and green; I’m not sure what the owner had intended. Anyway – it arrived safely, I looked things over, and did some much needed repairs. It had been assembled using superglue, so a lot of the wall joins were failing. Even after fixing that (plastic cement and lots of rubber bands!), the joins needed some work, so I used some spackle to fill all of the wall gaps. Once that was done, being a quite large bit of terrain, I stored it out in the garage, with the intention of moving on to the next steps in short order.

And then, as is often the case with this hobby, some other new shiny thing caught my eye, and the fortress has sat, and sat, and sat. Looking at my eBay order email, I now see that the fortress has been sitting neglected in the garage for a year and a half. Whoops. That’s certainly no way to defend the realm…

However, this past weekend, I (finally) made good use of some nice weather, and next steps have been taken. Having lived in the garage for so long, all of the castle sections first needed a bath, as they were heavily assaulted with dust. After that, thanks to it being a hot, sunny day, they were quickly dried and ready for some new primer.

I started with a matte black (above). Once that was dry – being 80 or so and very sunny, a matter of minutes – I moved on to a mid-tone grey, using Monument Hobbies matte grey primer.

Next steps will be drybrushing some lighter tones of grey over the whole thing, and picking out details. I’ve seen a number of these painted up, and the ones with the occasional brick picked out in a different color, along with some moss here and there, really look nice, so I intend to copy that.

1. Lo and behold, my wife also knew what I was after, and surprised me by buying one of them as well. So yes, I did end up with two mighty fortresses. I’m considering painting the second one up and making it look more evil or chaos-like – maybe some 3d printed vines and spikes and such? But not yet – one castle at a time. ↩︎