Bastle House Project, the beginnings of the interior

 

rather than laying in miniature tiles I drew them into the matte-board floor

       Having finally finished painting the exterior I shifted gears and started on the interior of the model. Rather than trying to paint and model the interior features directly onto the walls I decided to build them as flat objects that I could simply glue to the walls after painting was completed. Regular readers will likely be aghast at the idea of me carefully measuring things to ensure a tight fit, but I assure you that all the measurements were made by marking directly from the model onto the materials and the ruler served only in the capacity of a straight edge for drawing lines. 

        The first step was to draw flagstones on the floor of the room that I was working on. The thick soft matte-board is easily indented by a ball-point pen (much like the roller indented the blue board). With the flagstones delineated it was a simple matter to paint over the floor with  thinned-down paint so the dark lines showed between stones. This worked even better than I thought it would.

 

the floor with a coat of thinned paint, 

the lines between the flagstones are too clear so another coat of paint will be applied 

 

       Next was the creation of the interior walls. At the time of their building most houses and castles were plastered with lime. The bright white of the lime helped alleviate the dark interior. I made each interior wall as a piece of matte-board, on this board I painted the appearance of the wall in the manner of a stage-prop. Once the paint had dried it was a simple matter to glue the wall to the interior with my trusty friend; Titebond wood glue.

 

the windows and gun-ports are painted in forced perspective

 and correspond to the location of windows on the exterior of the model

I made a little template to ensure that they all looked alike

 

 

the entry level, I tried a more regular pattern for the floor,

 I can't say that I'm entirely happy with the results

 

test-fitting prior to gluing

 

the matte-board will add substantially to the strength of the model 

painting the walls as inserts was a great deal easier than 

trying to paint details inside that small enclosed space

        That takes care of the small house. I don't know if I am going to make the deadline on this project as I have but three days until I leave on vacation to Ireland. I still have the Large House and the kitchen and stables to complete!