Orthanc - The Tower of Isengard
My big project for the last few months has been constructing a large Isengard game board, including part of the river Isen and enough space outside and inside the walls for a decent size force. At the moment I'm focusing on the main centre piece of the board, the tower, it's about 45cm in height from the base up to the platform at the top (i.e. excluding the spikes).
Below I explain how I created the tower and it's various pieces. My progress can be seen in the photos on the left.
24th August
14th September
I created the main shape by layering 4.5cm thick pieces of foam that I cut into X-shapes. After gluing these together (using PVA) I then refined the shape and glued a thin piece of foam on top for the platform.
To give the tower a more smooth and consistent texture I glued paper onto each face and then covered it with enough PVA glue to cover the joins.
The spikes at the top of the tower and the smaller ones going up the side of the tower are cut from foam and the smaller ones covered with PVA glue, whilst the large spikes have paper glued on.
The windows were just cut out of 'cereal box' card and glued to the tower.
The vertical lines running up the tower were added by gluing lengths of wool onto the tower, carefully burning off the excess fibres and then coating the wool with PVA glue.
To get the design on the platform on top of the tower I used a craft knife to cut out lines in a piece of paper, which I then simply stuck on with some glue. Originally I had planned a more complicated design, but it just didn't turn out to be practical so I simplified it.
Once all the various spikes, platforms and the stairs and door where glued on to the main structure I sprayed the entire model with Chaos Black spray paint from GW. (I did discover though that any polystyrene that isn't covered with paper or glue, will disintegrate from the aerosol in the spray. So I had to do some small patching.)
The next stage will be to go through and paint the details.
