Baueda's Excellent 15mm Scale Italian Tower
On 5th January 2017 Baueda finally announced that the pre-production one piece Italian Tower was available to pre-order. See http://www.baueda.com/15medieval.html#10TOW to order. Please note I am not connected to Baueda in any way. Since I have a few Italian Medieval army options I knew I had to have one, but I ordered two because I was unsure if I would want two and I can experiment in how I painted them. I already have two JR Mini's Italian towers which I have previously blogged so decided that I would paint one of the towers to match these. See here for that blog entry http://drewjarman.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/jr-miniatures-italian-medieval-tower.html
Anyway back to the Baueda review. I ordered the towers and some other items and waited for them to arrive getting on with other painting items in the mean time. About a week later the towers etc turned up, their usual excellent service.
As with all resincast items they needed some cleaning up but because I ordered some of the first out of the moulds they were very crisp with very little problem areas. A quick clean up of air bubbles and a good wash in washing up liquid and a toothbrush had them prepared for painting. I then put them aside whilst I cleared other items off the workbench.
It wasnt until yesterday that I was finally able to make a start on the towers having black undercoated them last week during some down time when I was waiting for other painted items to dry.
The towers fit onto a 40mm x 40mm base with no problems and the flared top means that you can also easily fit in a 40mm c 40mm based element of artillery or anything else that takes your fancy.
The tower dimensions are [excluding my own base addition] 49mm wide at the top and 76mm tall [approx]. The brickwork detail lines are quite fine and care must be taken not to lose them when painting the casting. I used a watered down black undercoat and coated it twice. On the Baueda website he used a stone tower finish and I did comment to him that I thought that red brick would be more historically accurate. Since the tower isn't based on any particular real life tower but a composition creation [AFAIK] for wargames use I Googled for images for ideas and drew inspiration from the towers in Lucca, Lazise, Piedmont, Brisighella, Florence and Torgiano.
I painted the other tower a slightly different way to mirror other towers I have seen pictures of and to give them a larger proportion of visible corner stones in a limestone colour.
The tower took me about three hours to paint in all with drying times taking into account and another 15 minutes to hand varnish to protect it. I am very pleased with the final effect of the tower and recommend that no Italian army or combat in Italy from the 12th Century onwards would be complete without at least one tower!
Pictures of the second tower are now after the first tower.
Pictures of the second tower are now after the first tower.
