Cheap Wargames Terrain: Toy Medieval Castle Repaint

This was part of a $20 find at "Lifeline" - the secondhand charity shop.(There's more stuff but it has already been claimed for the sandpit!) 

I decided to only use cheap craft paint and old brushes; basically whatever I had lying around. My aim was also to make the toy castle look tabletop-worthy in 2hrs and not waste any of my good paints and brushes.

Kids toys are a great cheap source of wargaming gear. I used to carry around a 15mm and a 28mm mini in my glovebox but I am getting pretty good at eyeballing things now.  I notice the Buzz Lightyear space fighters will do well in 15mm scale I think; the included plastic pilots are very close to 15mm.... 

....anyway, back to the castle - some before-and-after photos.

I used only craft paint; I spraypainted black; then lightly with grey, then a VERY rough light grey drybrush. You can see some of the original 'minis' it came with besieging the front gate.

It looked pretty 'plastic-y' and not quite the right scale....  ...but because it is meant for younger kids it is very robust - good for gaming. 

You can see the men of Gondor don't look terribly out of place, and when I consider how much a terrain piece of this size would cost from GW, I am happy enough how it turned out. A fair return for $20 and 2 hrs, I reckon.  I have promised to play LOTR with my kids and I have sneakily been teaching my son the core rules through my home-made 'army man' game (we play at the beach with a dozen or so plastic army men each - last mission was for him to retrieve data from a downed fighter and escape - I control the opfor in a 'cinematic' manner...)

We've also been playing a lot of Mechwarrior:Online so I suspect mech-related wargames will emerge. More randomly, I'm thinking about inventing a rock-wars game (glue eyeballs on rocks and they have stats/combat values based on how shiny/how big/heavy/what colour etc)....  

...Anyway here are the 'after' shots....