Coastal Fort Part III

I know all of you have been waiting for weeks now, constantly pressing your "refresh" button on your browser awaiting the final installment of the Coastal Fort Chronicles. Well, the time has finally arrived. Let's finish this thing up.

We need to finish that pesky round tower so it matches the rest of the fortress. For this, I carefully rolled the paper around the tower and cut it so it was the right size, then used the same glue stick I used for the rest of the fort. I was a little worried it would come undone before it dried because of its shape, so I put a few pins in it along the seam overnight. Originally I was going to cover the faces of the crennelations (I think that's what they're called -- the little teeth things), but then decided it was too much work and might look better this way anyhow. If there are some places along the edges where you didn't get enough glue, take your Xacto blade and slice a little glue off the glue stick and then insert the blade under the paper and smear it around a bit, then pin it.




We also need to deal with the base of the round tower. Cut a piece of brick paper and slide it into place.



Now it's time to fix all those nasty corners that we left incomplete. I printed up some stone corners to hide these imperfections. Cut them out, then gently fold (but don't crease!) to get them to wrap around the corners properly. Glue with a glue stick.





Cut two shorter ones for the area around the base of the round tower. The end result isn't perfect, because I wanted to be able to remove the tower and use all the components separately. If you don't need to remove the tower, you can fill in some of those gaps with some clump foliage to make it look like vines.



At this point, you are probably noticing just how impregnable this fortress is. In fact, it's also inaccessible, because there are no doors to allow anyone in or out. Once again, I turned to the computer, found an appropriate door and printed some out, then glued them on. I put two doors on the tower, one for each level, which would also allow it to be used by itself, though the second story door would open to nothing. So basically I've assumed that you would enter through the double doors near the dock, then enter the tower from somewhere inside the lower level, where you could then exit to either the second or third level. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could put some sort of trap door on the top of the tower to show some way of getting up there, but I opted not to, figuring it's already a small space and if there's anybody up there, they'd just be hiding it anyway.




At this point, the fortress is essentially done. If you want it to be perfect, one, don't ask me to build it, and two, you can fill in the small gaps where the walls intersect with some caulk (which you then have to paint after it dries. I'm talking about the gaps on top of the walls here.)

It's also at this stage that I was 100 percent sure I should have made the island a little bigger. The smart thing to have done would have been to build the fortress, then figure out the island size instead of the other way around. I didn't account for enough of the wall thicknesses, so that ate into space I thought would be around the fort and to some degree, some of the room on the various levels of the fort. But oh well, it's not the end of the world.

Now let's tackle the island. The inspiration picture shows the island essentially surrounded by a sea wall, which makes sense. Otherwise your fortress is liable to be eroded right back into the sea after a few seasons of storms. The picture also shows (the picture is in Part I for reference) a small beach area on one portion, which I thought would be nice not only for the occasional pirate who loves looking for shells and catching some rays, but also for a place to pull up some small boats during a raid. I used my hot wire foam cutter to carve a small indentation into my island and made the slope as gentle as I could, but it still ended up being kind of steep.

Before we do any more with the beach, we need to tackle the sea wall. I used my small scribing tool (it has a small metal ball on the end of it, you can use an ink pen held at a steep angle to get the same effect) to scribe in lines on the foam. Neatness does not count, because the battering a sea wall takes leaves a lot of irregularities. Keep your lines mostly perpendicular to each other and you'll get good results. Draw four parallel horizontal lines, then draw a vertical line in row one and row three. Move over a bit, then do the same thing for row two and four. Move over again, and repeat for rows one and three. Repeat this process approximately 2,354 times, eyeballing what looks right for your actual stone size.



Once your stone wall is scribed, now paint it a light grey. Drybrush burnt sienna, burnt umber and just a touch of white in succeeding layers. If you like darker mortar joints, start with a darker grey.




With the sea wall complete, we can now go to the beach (grab your sun screen). I took a base tan latex paint and painted the beach area and went ahead and did the whole island top while I was at. While the paint in the beach area is still dry, dump some sand on it. I used builders sand like they use to mix mortar with. It has some nice little pebbles and such in it that work nicely. A beach usually has a tide line (unless your planet doesn't have a moon or your fortress is in a lake) where the tide stops coming in and dumps all its accumulated garbage, seaweed and the occasional dead body. I took some dark burnt umber paint and drybrushed a rough line, feathering it toward the top of the beach, then took some dried moss (get some at your local craft shop) and glued it along the tide line and other areas of the beach to simulate seaweed and other floating yuck that washed up last night.





I wanted some walkways/dock areas to be paved, so I printed out more of the random stone pattern I had used for the floors of the fortress, and cut them to fit various areas and glued them to island. Some of them will be covered by the fortress, but again, for versatility, I figured I might want to use the island without any fort on it so placed them with that in mind.
Once that was done, I gave the island another coat of tan latex paint, then dumped a sprinkling of sand, some light gray fine railroad ballast (Woodland Scenics is the brand) along with a touch of dark gray ballast and a light sprinkle of green flock (no matter how desolate a place,there's always some hardy green weeds around).





Now, we just put the fortress in place. Here's the final result, minus some additional detailing, like more seaweed around the edges and maybe some posts to tie ships up to along the dock area.




These shots show how versatile the design is. There's one without the upper level and one with just the tower, and finally one with a village on the island with no fortress at all (and of course you can use the fort on dry ground without the island.)





And finally, ladies and gentlemen, the stars of our show, from left to right: Peter "Who needs a plungin'?" Boatswain, Dick "Iron balls" Richardson and Jack "Sexy hat" McGee.


Please be sure to comment so that I can reassure myself that someone is actually reading this thing. Also, if you are interested in purchasing the island fortress, let me know.
Thanks!