Continued from Castle Diorama V: Cliffs and Arrow Slits…
Finally! No more casting and filing Hirst Arts blocks to build the wall of the castle. A couple of days ago, I reached the top of the tower so I could proceed from constructing to painting the whole thing.
But first a few building notes.
To add some visual interest to the small wall, I decided to add a closed-off window or door. When you see medieval buildings today, they are usually filled with the alterations of both the middle ages and later times, and I wanted to include that in the castle.
The insides of the great tower, the Löwenturm, would be closed off from view, but since you could still look inside through the arrow slits, I painted the insides a dark grey. Then I placed some large blocks of polystyrene to serve as a foundation for the upper level of the tower.
I used a lot of plaster on the inner wall to give a look of deterioration and then painted everything dark grey as an experiment. I also filled in the many joints between the cast to give the walls a more complete look. It helped, but it’s not there yet. 
To continue the experiment, I painted the fieldstones on the short wall in various colours and gave the whole a grey wash to tie it together. It looked horrible! Something had to be done, more about that later.
I then cut a round piece of polystyrene to fit the insides of my 6″ tower. The round piece is supported by two large coloumns of polystyrene underneath, making it seem pretty stable.
After the floor was glued in, I began building the upper level, which I had looked forward to in a loooong time while filing the casts to fit the walls. 
When building both an outside and inside tower, a lot of casts are needed as I discovered several times during the building proces. Fortunately fresh cast pieces can be put in the owen for about an hour at 60 degrees Celsius and be ready to build with. When building in the wintertime as I am now, it feels very nice to build with warm casts.
The idea with the 6″ outer tower and 4″ inner tower is obviously to give the wall a realistic thickness. In 1:45 scale the wall are a little more than two meters thick, which sounds good for a medieval tower to me.
To fill the space between the inner and outer tower I used crumbled pieces of polystyrene. The building is very heavy as it is, so it seemed important to fill it with something not too heavy.
I then made a mix of thick plaster and small pebbles to fill the top of the gap. Medieval castle walls were often contructed like this with two outer stone walls and a mix of mortar and stones in the middle.
Here’s a view of the completed tower. I am quite satisfied with the result as the wall seems really thick and strong.
After covering much of the walls with plaster for a more varied look, it was time to paint the castle.
After the initial colour failure I looked around in books and on the internet for inspiration. In a used-bookshop in Copenhagen I stumbled upon a coffee-table book filled with beautiful images from the duchy of Burgundy. The houses and castles there were all light-brown and beige and several walls were plastered over in the same colour. It looked perfect.
Stone tower in Semur-en-Auxois, Burgundy, France. Photo: Holly Hayes
While I had originally decided that the diorama should be set in Germany, Burgundy seemed close enough to pick colours from.
Experience has taught me that it is much easier to begin with a light colour and then add dark washes for effect rather than beginning with a dark base colour and adding highlights.
So I painted the whole castle Buff Titanium from the Pebeo Studio acrylics range. The colour seemed quite harshly yellow at first, but after adding a brown/grey wash on top, it looked a lot better. Above is the result after the first wash, where most of the colour immediately was wiped off with a piece of cloth.
I am quite satified with plastering over the fieldstones. As you can see on the right, I varied the thickness of the layer to let the fieldstones show through.
At the bottom of the Löwenturm, I finally completed the door. It’s made from strips of wood with a door handle of steel wire. After a coat of brown paint, it received a number of black washes and some grey drybrushing.
Here’s the top of the tower again after the first paint and wash.
I think the next step should be to pick out individual stones with washes in varying colours to add some more life to the walls. After that a highlight will follow and then lots and lots of vegetation!
A man and a cat enjoying the view from the castle.
The tower is now almost 11 meters or 36′ high in 1:45, which looks convincing to me without taking up all of the little room left in my workshop.
The next projects on the diorama will be to finish the paintjob on the castle, build the halftimbered house and build hatches to close off the dungeon.
Continued in Castle Diorama VII – Grass, Moss and Ballast…
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Awesome display. The step-by-step pics are a great way of showing how your castle was built up and then the finishing touches applied. I like the added details, like the cat. Thanks for sharing.
Awesome modeling work, something like this I’m thinking of doing. I have modeled in ” O ” scale for many years only building and running trolley cars on my long ago layout. but I’m interested in your castle building and am thinking of using some of your ideas, one thing I think you might add to these castle dioramas is plenty of stone rubble around the base of the castle, I’ve used Hydrocal Plaster as this lighter than regular plaster as I’ve used it in mountains and some buildings that I casted in molds again many years ago. thank you for sharing your great work with us. Karl
Thanks for your comments
There is still a lot of work to go on the castle diorama, and I have thought a bit about stone rubble around the castle. I believe that most ruined castles owes much of their ruined state to locals retrieving stones to use for their own building purposes. Therefore most larger stones would be in use somewhere else and not be lying around.
Thanks for the tip about Hydrocal plaster. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, but never been able to find it somewhere around my native Denmark.
I’m very happy if my modelling work would serve as an inspiration to you.