The Port of Gierburg - Part 3: Dock Section I Painted & Extras

In the previous instalment I described the building process of the first dock section for my Port of Gierburg project. Today I am going to show the finished piece, give a few painting hints and discuss extra pieces.

Painting the dock section

Painting the dock section was pretty straight forward and similar to my last stoneworks on the Town House and House Fronts. It's all about applying different greys (with brown, black and "bone") and some green and brown washes and pigments. I really enjoy painting stonework because you can get "all dirty", try out a lot of things and rarely do anything wrong in the process.

The main colours I used are Vallejo's Sand Light, Flat Earth and Neutral Grey from the Model Color range, plus a bottle of cheap black that I have been using for years. Mixing these colours basically gives you all you need. For the finishing touches I used watered down dark green and Devlan Mud (from Games Workshop).

I am very happy with the plaster cobblestones from Vampisol: they paint up rather nicely and look great as a large area. As usual I spent a lot of time painting individual stones which is the key to the effect.

Top view of the cobblestone from Vampisol

Trade Goods

The nicest half-timbered house is still just a boring sight when placed on an empty board all by itself. Adding bits such as barrels, crates and sacks to the gaming board goes a long way in making the table more interesting.

For habour scenes Ainsty Castings has a variety of very nice scenery items in their Tade Goods range.

Trade goods from Ainsty Castings

Similar items are available from Tabletop-Art: I bought the Stacked boxes and barrels set 2.

Stacked boxes and barrels set from Tabletop-Art

Compared to the Ainsty bits the Tabletop-Art pieces are much smaller. Especially the barrel stack (see photo, in the middle) appears somewhat tiny, although it is of course perfectly legitimate to have smaller barrels than the average 28mm scenery (funnily, the set is explicitly tagged as 30mm scale).

From the rabble-rousing leader of the Gierburg peasants I had a few MaxMini.eu crates left that I painted up.

A bunch of crates from MaxMini.eu

Now while I'm at it, I might as well mention the other products I either use or plan on purchasing:

• Crates and sacks from Antenocitis Workshop (see here)
• Barrels and crates from Pardulon (see here again)
• Crates, corn sacks and barrels from Stronghold Terrain (see sacks here)
• Groceries and Supplies from Tabletop World
• Rope coils from Black Cat Bases (among a lot of other things)
• Ship's Kit (GOW-SA001) and Small AnchorS (GOW-SA006) from Games of War's Pirate Supplies range

Animals

Lastly, I finally used a cat and a mouse from the Dog, Cats, Mice (ACK011) set by Mirliton (see: Historical 25-28mm > Medieval > Accessories). I really like this set a lot with its characterful animals and highly recommend it.

Stronghold Terrain also has an animal set and I will definately want to add that to my collection of beastly citizens of Gierburg.

Scratch-built jetty

I extended the built-in GrandManner jetty by scratch-building a similar piece. Bascially it is the same thing as the gallows I did years ago, comprising of many coffee stirring sticks.

First, I build a frame for the jetty. The length was chosen to accommodate the Ainsty ships.

The construction is rather simple but took me pretty long to build nonetheless. The jetty consists of 88 coffee sticks cut to length. To give wood constructions like this a finely detailed look I find it important to do some work on the wooden bars. I filed the edges of each stick to give them an irregular cut-to-size appearance.

After glueing the sticks on the frame I used the spike of a compass to poke two holes near the end of each bar to give the impression of nail holes.

From the GrandManner harbour kit I had six bollards left (two per kit) that I could use for this large jetty. The bollards come with small slits meant for the GrandManner resin jetty piece's overlapping bars. I filled them with putty and then glued them to my jetty.

Painting was the usual drybrushing job with browns, greys and bone white.

The finished dock section

Now finally for some photos of the finished piece:

I set up the board with ships (the Old Glory Brigantine and Games of War's Sea Dog and two Sea Pup tenders) and buildings (fronts and Town House). Figures are Gierburg Peasants and Bounty Hunters painted by Simon Bradley.

Up next: Part 4: Dock Section II