Day two, and it’s time to get cracking on one of the large compounds. The whole 18′ high wall issue had to come to a head and it did: I bought the wrong bloody thickness of foam. I really should have got a sheet of 3″ polystyrene as that would have allowed me to simply slice lengths off like a loaf of bread. As it was the only thing I could do was get the saw out and hack away. The result was fine in terms of wall thickness, but the wood saw does leave a very rough finish. That said, look at the picture below. The wall there looks less than impressive when it comes to quality of finish. I’m going to be adding lashings of tile grout and PVA, possibly with some fine sand mixed in to give a more textured finish, so I think I can live with the hand-sawn look.
Ultimately, I am building a limited number of these larger compounds with the very high walls; the smaller stuff will have 2″ walls, so that will be fine.
Right, let’s look at the build. As we have seen, I marked out the layout on the MDF bases and essentially I stuck to that. Here are the three primary compound walls.
You can see how I cut this in around the surface rocky outcrops here:
I wanted to start the build with the main compound walls as that is how I think these things would be constructed. In a somewhat anarchic society your first priority is to build your defences, after than comes the luxury of a roof over your head.
Next was the interior walls. I “cheated” here and bought a pile of doors from Warbases which are ideal for a rustic look across many periods.
You can see how I built that up in this photo.
I’ve not decided on how I’ll do the roofs yet. I want them to be “lift-off” so I considered artists mounting board and foam board, but I think I’ll be going with MDF as this is thin but solid. AT this stage I just added some internal support which these will sit on.
The idea of the modular terrain is that I’ll be able to mix and match two halves of the compound to get variety. Here’s the combination of a larger and a smaller module. You can see that I’ve used the hot wire to shape the wall edges, a job which it does with ease and very quickly.
This looks very rough at present, it’s just the polystyrene bits. I plan to add some wooden bits from matchsticks as well as some additional small structures on the roofs and then I’ve got some pots and general “scatter” to add some character. Warbases have some nice packs of goats which will look good as well.
Next I’m going to try to crack out the rest of the polystyrene structures before I move on the the other mediums. This is a big build project, so I am taking a somewhat industrial approach. Having put my back out I am finding that I can stand without much discomfort, whereas sitting typing this is bloody uncomfortable! Hence this short update.
More tomorrow.