Matsue Castle

I have completed painting Matsue Castle. The castle, technically the castle keep, is located Shimane Prefecture about 250 km northwest of Osaka. Dating back to the early 1600s it was the home of the Horio, Kyōgoku and Matsudaria clans, remaining in the possession of the latter for ten generations until 1927. Known as the "Black Castle" it has survived more or less intact despite wars and earthquakes. Today is registered as a National Treasure of Japan.

This was the last, and by far the biggest, of the Japanese buildings in the current set. I had put it off until the end in part because it allowed me to practice all the skills needed to complete it on the smaller structures and in part because it is such a big beast, with a total of 15 large and 38 small parts.

Thankfully assembly was pretty straightforward with clear plans.  All the pieces fitted together perfectly in the dry assembly.

Some parts, however, were just as awkward to paint as the Geisha House because some the interior pieces are all printed as one. 

Sensibly I worked from the bottom up. The internal space of the entrance way had to be painted before it was assembled otherwise it would have been impossible to get at the nicely detailed stone work and its supporting timbers. No exterior painting was done at this point, but the doors, gatehouse floor and lintel were painted at the same time.

The movable doors and lintel could then be assembled. I used some welding wire as pins for the doors so that they could swing inwards.

The gatehouse floor will remain removable after assembly to allow the doors to be opened and closed.

The next piece was the gatehouse wall that sits on top of the previous piece. This piece was painted interior and exterior with the shutters open.

The final piece for this first level is the main floor...and it is a big piece. Yet again I started on the worked on the interior parts that were the most difficult to access with a brush. The stairwell...

And then the main floor, with the well cover removed here.

Just getting the woodwork right was the main challenge here and I wanted the tone on this level to be richer than the entrance way so my colour mix was a base of Burnt Sienna over a black undercoat, then a blend of Burnt Sienna and yellow, followed by the same tone with a splash or two of white. Getting into those areas around the stairs and the well was difficult.

With all the interior work done the gateway and gateway wall were fixed to the base.

With that assembly done the stone base was painted.

Then it was onto the level one wall, the black wall that gives the keep the name of the "Black Castle", and gatehouse roof.

The second floor (one piece printing) was a relatively simple painting task. The rich wood tones and the blue tiled roof are the stars here.

And the castle was beginning to get some height now.

The third level was the most difficult to paint with those damned shoji panels again! But it was worth it...

This is where the real height comes in...

Levels four and five, and the final decoration pieces, complete the model.

And there it stands in all its glory - all four faces - 220mm deep, 180mm wide and 280mm tall.

I had thought this piece would take two weeks to complete, but it took six days - about 13 hours of actual painting time.

 

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Villages for the Franco-Prussian War - Part 4: Five More Village Houses.

Five more Lorraine houses have joined the three from a week ago.

There are two byre houses. 

Two dwellings are build to allow a bend in the street, not a big bend, but enough to allow a visual change.

The fifth is a smaller dwelling.

All five together...

The remaining five buildings in the series are in progress, with the intention of completing the set by the end of the month..

The Geisha House

Well it has been a cold week in the City of Sails this week, the coldest of the winter so far with 3 consecutive days of heavy frosts - dropping as low as -6 on the thermometer by my back door in Thursday morning (even though the Met Service reported as only -2.5), but days have been the glorious sunny. That is not cold by a long shot for many readers, but in our sub-tropical environment that is cold, and since the cold settles in around 3:00PM, it is a perfect excuse to get down to some painting and scratch building.

The one item completed in the latter half of the week is painting of the Geisha House in the Japanese building set I am painting for a friend. If is a beautiful print, but I embarked on this task with some trepidation because the model is printed in only six parts: the base, the main level of the house (with three rooms), the roof and three internal sliding doors. The limited number of parts had an advantage in that there is minimal assembly, but it was ohhhhh sooooo difficult to get a brush into those narrow interior spaces - especially those shoji panels

An example of that difficulty is shown below. That Buddha statue is part of the main level - a one piece print.   It sits within a boxed area 12mm square by 18mm deep. There are shoji panels on walls on three sides that need to be painted...what an exercise in frustration! But I got through it. 

All up I tallied up 12 hours work on this piece.

There is a minor design flaw with this model. The sliding doors - the front door and the two internal doors -  are over size by about 1.5mm which prevents the roof from sitting properly on the location lugs. Its a simple enough fix, but I wish I had known about it before I painted them.

And here is that Buddha statue again with its surrounding panels painted.

The final (and next) piece in this series is the castle - I will need to draw on all the skills used painting other items in this range to complete it. 

Villages for the Franco-Prussian War - Part 3: The First of the Village Houses.

The plan for the Lorraine village is to make the village church (completed) and eight or ten villages houses. This post shows the first three (well four really) pieces.

The typical Lorraine village, called village-rue, is made up mainly of byre houses all built in a row along the rue principale or "high street" that was generally the only street in the village. The village houses were joined each other so that a solid row of houses is formed along the road. A intersecting road might be similarly lined with row houses.

The Lorraine byre house was a farm house in which the living quarters on one side of the building, in two storeys, and storage farm machines or animals in the other. Walls were of stone and are either rendered or simply whitewashed. The lintels, jambs and sills of the windows and doors were typically local sandstone or limestone. Wooden shutters were fitted to windows.  A fuller description  of Lorraine houses can be found on John Boadle's blog (Link).

The first piece shown here is a byre house with the barn living quarters on the left and the barn on the right. Usually there would be a barn door front and back so that carts and wagons could be run through to a yard behind, but I have chosen not to do that in this case, but other models on the work desk will be built like that.

Front

The second piece is also a byre house.

Front

Back

The third piece is two smaller houses, perhaps workers houses, on a single base. I have to admit I would not like to live in that little house with the steps...it would be OK  on the uppe floor, but downstairs with just those two little windows would make it pretty dark and dingy...

Front

Back

The ends of these two blocks have been left smooth so that they can be positioned side by side. I have painted a few cracks and carved a few areas exposed stonework into the MDF to break up the visual smoothness of the surface.

This will  allow the street rows to be organised into different combinations.

The forms for several more buildings have been assembled ready for detailing to be applied.