While tiding up my flat the other day, I rediscovered a book that I had bought a long time ago : Warhammer Siege supplement for the 4th edition :
I remembered that these siege rules were especially nice to play: take down the walls , sapping etc ... So I told myself that for my next battle, I absolutely had to hold a siege! I already had the fortress : one door, two towers and two walls. The only thing to do was to make siege accessories.
The door with figs being painted and the first accesories
1) The ladders
To make ladders, nothing easier : kebab skewers with their ends cut and toothpicks. I pierced along the skewers holes with a 1.5 drill and then cut pieces of toothpicks glued inside each hole. I have to thank my lovely and understanding wife because she went to buy me everything I needed. The result is sufficient enough compared to what I expected :
To paint them, I'll just spray-paint them in brown, with a dry-brush after that : nothing complicated.
2) Grappling hooks
I always considered this accesory to be great and essential to give a little "assault on Helm's Deep" style to my next battle. Then again, a quickly and efficiently done job with everyday material. I cut a piece of toothpick and glued 4 bent pieces of paper clip on it. Then, I wrapped around it a little string, and hold everything together with some more glue. Here is the result :
For the color, I plan on painting the hook in brown, then highlight it with a bubonic brown drybrush.
3) Battering rams
With the obvious purpose of knocking down doors, I needed battering rams built in order to hold on top of a regiment. I saw myself back in elementary school, when I picked up in the park everything that could be of use. I struggled to find adequate woodsticks and even had to wait for a wedding in the south of France to get ahold of what I needed... Just like I did for the ladders, I pierced holes and inserted pieces of toothpicks in them. I finally bevel-cutted the stick with a knife to make it look hand-crafted and more realistic :
4) Siege battering ram
Well, for this item, I didn't want to build something with my own hands. After a thorough search, I found a cheap Citadel original battering ram (18€ on ebay.co.uk), with a few missing compenents unfortunately. A bargain :
Two wheels were missing, so I ordered them on a website selling bitz. However, for the missing part of the roof and the second beam, I didn't to look for them for too long. Fortunately, there is a solution I only found a few weeks ago : Instant Mold. It's actually kind of a paste, between plastic and latex, that becomes soft after 30 seconds in boiling water, soft enough to make a mold around a fig. You just need to use two parts for each side of the mold, which looks like that :
Then, each part of the mold is filled with green stuff or milliput, left to dry (for about 5 hours) and you get a replica of the components with more or less detail, but the final result is still convincing :
I save the other pieces for a next article!
See you soon
