Skullvane Manse

After painting quite a few models for our Border Princes campaign, and a good chat in the comments of fellow blogger Kuribo’s latest post, I decided to get some terrain done. I wanted this terrain to contribute towards the campaign, so painted an old (well not so old!) Warhammer terrain kit: Skullvane Manse, also known as Warscryer Citadel in its Age of Sigmar re-release. For the campaign, it will be used for battles fought around the town of Aldium, which is home to many wizardy types that like to do their research far from the gaze of imperial witch hunters!

It is quite a fun model, with a ton of detail. The rickety tower reminds me of the tower Merlin is given in the old Disney movie The Sword in the Stone for those that remember that! With its giant telescope it seems like an excellent home to a wizard. It is covered in Empire iconography, but you have to fool witch hunters somehow!

This model is very tall, and was a bit of a challenge to paint as a result. The only sub-assembly I did was to keep the telescope cupola separate, and I kept the rest of the model in one piece which was definitely a mistake. This made the painting process much more complicated, as I had to wield this big model while trying to get to many hard to reach places.

I did have a lot of fun painting it however, it is just covered in fun details, and while I was initially going to paint it to my normal terrain standard, I ended up putting quite a bit of time into this model.

This model has a lot of stone on it, and one thing I did to break all that up was to make the natural rock a blue grey, and the artificial stonework a more desaturated grey. I don’t think that came through in the photos that well however, but in person it’s pretty visible.

Another bit of experimenting I did was with the telescope’s lens. I painted the lens as I would any other, but then instead of gloss varnish to finish it off, I filled the hollow part with UV Resin, and cured it in place. This gives a pretty fun effect in person, hard to capture in photos but I’ll let you imagine it. The UV resin is 2-3mm thick above the painted area, so the depth really adds a lens-like quality to it,

To give you a sense of the scale of this model, and showcase some detail not captured in the photos above here are some more photos with models included.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed that model! I’m not sure what’s headed to the painting table next, but given how much fun I had painting this I could well see more terrain on its way soon!