My Osgiliath scenery as one of my few forays into buildings. They were a bit basic with none of the technique that others on the One Ring employ. Again these must have been made about 2004 /2005 I think. They were all made with normal polystyrene sheet (not foamcard or anything like that).
I used a combination of polystyrene sheet 15mm thick and a couple of pieces of interestingly shaped pieces of polystyrene packing that I'd put on one side because they might come in useful for modelling. These two interesting shapes had natural curves so it struck me that I could incorporate arches into them following these curves. By using a standing miniature I drew realistic sized arches on these pieces. The arches were then cut out using a craft knife. One of the arch pieces I decided to base simply but the other piece I expanded into a larger ruin by including an internal wall. I used some thinner polystyrene for this.
For my final piece I decided to go to town and incorporate a ruined internal stairway. A useful tip I'd picked up was to use cocktail sticks as reinforcing bars when gluing polystyrene sheet together, so in this complex piece, I used quite a few to hold it all together whilst the PVA glue was setting. I followed the internal wall as it turned the corner with the stairway.
Once the bases were ready, the ruins were glued to their bases with PVA glue. This was an easy task for the simpler designs but the more complex ones needed additional support provided by using cocktail sticks as mentioned earlier to join individual pieces together.
I found that by using this method I could assemble the whole stairs assembly in one gluing instead of slowly putting it together. This allowed me to get it looking right as a whole piece before the glue set.
Additional smaller blocks of polystyrene were glued onto the bigger boards to make pieces of fallen masonry. One shaped piece was laid near to an archway to suggest it had collapsed from the nearby arch. The ROTR plastic pillar was glued on too. Smaller ornamental stones and GW modelling gravel was scattered at the base of walls, in corners and in association with larger rubble to give a nice mix of sizes. I also had an idea of pushing some splintered lollypop sticks into one of the pieces to suggest some old rotten floorboards!
Once all the stonework was glued down with PVA it was left to dry overnight. The next day all the pieces were given a coat of textured paint, laying it on fairly thick on the walls and thinner elsewhere. This was then left overnight to fully dry. It's worth noting that the textured paint makes the polystyrene quite robust and helps to disguise the big cells of polystyrene quite nicely. (I've also used a mixture of find sand and PVA - this can sometimes work out cheaper than the textured paint).
The painting of these models was fairly easy. Firstly, all the bases were painted with Scorched Brown and the walls and stonework with Chaos Black.They were then left to dry overnight.
The fun then started by dry brushing everything with Codex Grey. Once this was dry it left a base that looked subtly different to the walls since one was grey over brown whilst the other was grey over black. The lines that suggested the separate blocks of stone that had been so carefully cut into the walls earlier still looked black. The pieces of lollypop stick were painted Scorched Brown and then dry brushed with a very light coating of Codex Grey to make then look rotten and decayed.
It was then a simple matter of adding a little Skull White to the Codex Grey and continuing to dry brush progressively lighter shades until I was satisfied with the result. The final dry brush was pure Skull White on some of the edges of the walls and stones. I found out that it was worth doing all the pieces together in one session to match them all together and give a unified look.
One of my lads suggested that it would be good to have some moss or algae growing on some of the walls. This was achieved by simply adding a smear of Dark Angel Green to certain places. I was careful not to overdo this. Sometimes less is definitely more!
The final touch was to add a few pieces of reindeer moss to four of the seven pieces to suggest that despite all the anger or Mordor, nature was still trying to take hold. ( I think now I would use real moss instead of reindeer moss as it often seems the wrong sort of scale).
|
I would love to have that as part of my terrain arsenal. Can't wait to see what other terrain pieces you've got in store on this journey 
