Hey gang, my brother invited me to post on the website when I am working on a project. I recently acquired a camera so I took some shots of my current project. I stopped working on it a few months ago and decided to try and finish it. Here are some pictures of where I am at and I will add more as I paint and add detail. Also I will explain how I did each of the steps up to this point. When I start a new project after this one I will make sure to take pictures from start to finish. I would like to make a disclaimer, none of my ideas are original and all of the techniques I use are borrowed from other modelers. On Tom’s Boring Mordheim forum I saw someone put together a japanese style village. He included a guard house on a cliff that I thought was really neat, so I thought I would try and make one myself. All woodwork is done from craft sticks. The building itself and the cellar are made from foamcore. The cliff sides and hill are carved out of polystyrene and touched up and detailed with some green two part modeling putty (not the GW kind).
Outside view of the guardhouse.
Another view of the outside.
Here is the outside entrance into the cellar.
The straw roof is done with a support structure of craft sticks and covered with an old bath towel. The towel is then painted with watered down PVA glue so that it doesn’t soak up too much paint. As the roof is brushed with PVA glue it is brushed in one direction so as to make the texture go in one direction also. This way it appears that the straw (towel fibers) is going in the direction that rainwater would make them go. Just need some more paint and the roof should be ready. When finished and painted you will be able to see what I mean about the texture for the straw.
Understructure of roof.
Roof by itself basecoated grey.
The building comes apart into three parts to make the interior playable for skirmish sized gaming.
The roof comes off and this is the unfinished interior of the guard house.
The main floor of the guard house is removable also, this is the cellar.
The cellar will have a ladder up to the main floor and has a door to the exterior. The main floor has three doors, two to the outside deck and one front one by the steps. I’m hoping that this will make for a fun defense scenario. Next up is the tree that is clinging to the cliff side. I made it out of wire, drywall spackle and some putty. Richy showed me how to make this style of tree, while it is a lot more work than buying premade ones and maybe even a bit more expensive, I think the outcome is rad. If we haven’t done an article on these yet I plan to make more and will put one together myself. Our upcoming warhammer campaign requires a hangman’s tree as a random terrain feature so perhaps that would be a good project to showcase that style of tree making.
My favorite part of the project is the spooky tree.
So that is it so far. I hope you enjoy the piece so far. I am excited to finish it and actually get to game on it. If you want anything explained in more detail, or have any critique feel free to comment. Hopefully you can borrow some ideas from the project and build something cooler. Take it easy.
