Having been a good friend and patron of Games Workshop Eastbourne for some time, I decided to smile kindly upon them and, as a surprise, present them with a one metre tall (condensed version) tower of Orthanc. It was well received and greatly admired all the way up the line of authority to the point that someone, somewhere, decided that the piece should leave its home to be used at Games Day. I, however, would not let it move. A one metre tall tower in the National Indoor Arena would be like sticking a toothpick in a tennis court!

I thought it would be best to start again and build one to fit a bit better. The second tower was proportioned to sit comfortably on a gaming table in a standard size store - this beast was going to be 1,600mm tall and travel in two pieces. The choice of materials to use was simple, foam board... and lots of foam board.

I've worked in the graphics and exhibition design world for ten years now, so finding armfuls of surplus board is very easy for me. My reference for the piece was a book entitled, The Lord of The Rings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy by Brian Sibley. One of the many 'tie-in' publications. On page 56 of this book there is a splendid full length shot of the movie miniature. I used this to roughly gauge proportion and the layout. Although larger than the first tower I had built, this one was still a little undersized. Using the height of a figure as a scale, the tower should have been another metre taller! Cutting holes in shop ceilings to accommodate a tower of this size would, however, be frowned upon. So, 1,600m it was to be. The base sits at about 500mm across and is mounted onto a thin plate of MDF board.

The main structural plates were cut and glued together using fast drying wood glue.

The main tower took a weekend to construct. A couple of days later, having gathered together as much courage as I could, I began the thoroughly rewarding, but mindnumbingly boring, task of detailing the beast. Beginning at the ground I started counting detail spines, replicating them approximately and gluing them into place. All the while keeping a written record of the number of bits I'd cut.

Over my 21 years of model making I've tried to evolve a second set of arms but so far it's not been at all successful, so I could only stick one piece on at a time.

With a few adjustments for artistic license thrown in here and there I made my way progressively up the tower cutting out windows and doors as I went. Spines, lines, hooks, barbs and claws all feature on the vast faces of the tower. Days passed and then weeks drifted by. After five weeks spent cutting and gluing I looked again through my reference material and saw that the tower had surface texture - but that it also had a carved surface too.

I almost cried. After composing myself again, though, I set about gouging, cutting, rolling and nibbling dents, cuts and all manner of imperfections into my neat tidy rendering.

Two days and four tubes of decorators' glue later, the finished structure was ready to be painted. Take one pot of black emulsion, a 1/2" artists' paintbrush (for all that fiddly detail) and thirteen hours, and the mighty white tower darkened its mood. Character was added to the model using metallic car spray paint, and the shades of graphite and silver blue highlighted the sharp bits, bringing it to life.

Fine details were picked out on the doors and a fast-setting resin glue, tinted dark blue, was dripped into all the windows. I airbrushed some low level weathering around the base to finish it off. And so, six weeks after I began the project, the mighty black tower stood before me. It was finally ready for delivery, with my brain ready for a long rest. In total it took the equivalent of a full 8' by 4' sheet of foam board, one litre of wood glue, one litre of black emulsion, 50 scalpel blades and a grand total of 2,355 pieces of board, card and wire. What a great way to spend six weeks!

I have also built a 4' wide Helm's Deep model but that's another adventure in modelling madness. What awaits my imagination in the future, who knows. Someone has mentioned the grand siege battering ram from The Return of The King, or I could go back to a past project idea from three years ago, where I spent two and a half months making technical schematic drawings of a Space Wolves Dreadnought at five times the size of the kit. This might be a fun challenge. I've also discovered that if I put a zero on the end of all the dimensions I get one life-size - I wonder how much room there is in the garage?

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