A lot of the action at the Battle of Pavia took place within the Pavia park walls. I could not recreate the battle without having these walls and the associated gates. This post covers the decisions on how to represent the walls, the construction and the final images.
Designing the Pavia park walls and gates.
I planned to represent the East, West and North walls of the park. On may layout this will require the construction of 36 feet of walls including 7 gatehouses. The gatehouses do not all exist today but there is one in the new Park that stands tall. I took the executive decision that I would model the gatehouses in the Old Park based on this design. A photo from Google Street View is shown below. I planned to make them from foam; one early decision was that I was not going to try and carve the bricks quite as small as they are in the image as my time and modeling skills were not up to it. Also the initial plan was to leave off the merlons on the top for similar reasons – I later changed this decision as I will discuss later.
I wanted to scale the walls to be a realistic height and therefore used a correct 1:56 scale to model them, this means that the gatehouses and walls are imposing. When I designed the walls I initially did not have merlons on the top, however I came across the following wood cut of Pavia which shows the merlons on the wall. The prospect of having them was too tempting to resist.
Building the walls.
The walls and gatehouses were constructed from pink foam. I cut the foam with a table top wire foam cutter. The bricks were then carved using a sharp knife. The process of carving bricks on 7 gate houses and 36 feet of walls turned out to be a much bigger job than I expected. I have now completed all of the gatehouses and 18 feet of wall. Here are some images of the making of the wall.
Once the walls were carved I textured the walls with aluminum foil. Here are a few photos of the process. You can see the before and after effect and it really makes the difference.
As I mentioned before I eventually decided to add merlons to the gates and walls. This was when I came across the idea of having them 3D printed. Overall I had 400 of them printed. When painted they work really well with the foam walls.
The bricks were painted a beige red from Vallejo. However I still wasn’t completely satisfied with the look. It was at this point I bought some sand-lesss tile ground in beige and brushed it into the gaps between the bricks. I then added iso-propyl alcohol and sealed it with scenic cement.
I then added the bases using cut mdf from Things from the Basement. They custom cut the bases to size. I then used foam and spackling to make the correct height and the channel for the canal.
Finishing the walls
The walls needed to be mounted on bases. Certainly on the West of the park there is a small canal alongside the wall. I am still trying to determine if there was one against the East wall. I wanted to model the canal. I also wanted to put some scatter terrain on the base and make sure that the color and texture of the base matched the terrain mat. Here are some images of the first six sections of the total of 18 sections that I am making. I placed various bushes, trees and other vegetation on the base. In a future article I will discuss the trees.
Summary
I still have a fair few walls to make, but the back of the job is broken as the gate houses are all finished and I have my construction methods are established. The Pavia park walls should make a good back drop to the terrain. The next post will probably be an update on the Landsknecht painting situation. With over 500 landsknechts the painting of them seems unending.