Building the Silver Tower
One of the things that I have wanted to make ever since the South Coast Grand Tournament was my very own Silver Tower as the centrepiece terrain feature or my Tzeentch table. I wasn't sure what to use as the start of the model though, until I came across this cheap (£6.99) lighthouse from The Range. I thought with a bit of tweaking it would work as the base for the model.
The first thing that I did was remove all of the shells and nautical decoration. It had al been attached with a glue gun so a quick go at it with the hobby knife allowed me to remove a lot of the detail and then I could sand down some bits that were a little rough.
However the lighthouse now needed to be AoS'd a little bit. To start with I designed a Tzeentch pattern that I got from the floor tiles from the silver tower game. I scaled them so they were larger at the bottom than the top and then I cut them out carefully. I needed three patterns to go round the tower as well as a couple of extra bits to hide the window and door openings. Once they were cut out I used spray glue to attach them to the lighthouse. I had to go round some of the designs with superglue to get them to stick securely.
The next step was to cut away the central pillar at the top. I drilled two holes in the top section and the main piece that could be joined by some wooden dowel. I then drilled a hole through a table tennis ball which was going to act as the eye of Tzeentch. I then used the laser cutter to cut out the nine Tzeentch spikes that would go round the top section. For final decoration I glued on some of the bits and pieces left over from the Lord of Change kits to add some more flavour to the design.
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I then made a new Tzeentch disc style base which I attached to the original wooden base. I drilled a 20mm hole into the bottom using a Forstner bit and glued a piece of clear acrylic tube into it. To make it look magically powered I used expending phone around the bottom and stuck a load of the spare Lord of Change heads into it. At this point I also made a base from MDF and lots of filler to give it some weight. I covered the pole with masking tape so that could paint the base.
With all the building now finished I was able to get on with painting the model. I painted it in four sections - the base, the tower, the base of the tower, and the eye.
The base was painted brown and grey, then dry brushed and flocked. I used a lot of blue and white spray paint to paint the magical cloud at the bottom, then sprayed the top silver. Some of the silver went onto the blue but I really wasn't concerned by this as it added to the mystical appearance. I then gloss varnished the cloud. I also edge highlighted all the silver parts as well.
The eye was sprayed with shades of blue and then I quickly picked out a nebula pattern with white on the eye. Again this was given a glossy finish.
I sprayed the tower with leadbelcher and then hit it with a silver spray to pick out details. I used the light blue to do the lighting effects on the tower. I used a little bit of gold on the top just for some contrast. Everything was then glued together using mitre adhesive. All I need to do now is to create some exciting game rules to go along with the piece....
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