This Week, I 'ave Been Mostly Makin'...

Hi, All!

Lieutenant Boddington and troopers explore the ruins of an ancient temple.

It's been a productive week for me, model-making-wise.

My Lost Continent terrain is taking shape fast, with a ruined temple, giant boulders and the beginnings of a lost city completed in the last few days.

First up: boulders.

Boulders are carved from green foam, sanded and glued to blank DVDs.

Any wargaming table should start out with a few basic pieces - trees, hills, rocks, whatever. I'm going for giant boulders.

The boulders are painted, highlighted, then sand is added to the DVDs.

These are based on blank DVDs - I have started using DVDs and old vinyl records as bases, as they are thin, yet guaranteed not to warp when you glue stuff to them. I've picked up a few records from second-hand stores for just this reason - being careful only to buy the kind of music I don't mind improving with copious amounts PVA, sand and paint.

Seductive Belgian adventuress Stella Artois and the infamous Professor Heineken liaise amongst the finished boulders.

Anyway, what more can you say about a bunch of rocks? They were quick to produce, although it is worth mentioning that PVA dries really slowly when trapped between chunks of insulating foam - Hob-e-Tac is much better...

American explorer Bud Weiser and his Nemesis, the wily Frenchman, Phillippe Le Glasse.

On to the next bit:

The Lost City of Ah-Pul-Sh'Napps.

Major Glenlivet leads sikh soldiers of the 4th Imperial Indian Exploratory Force into the unknown...

The Lost City will be made up of a number of set pieces of various sizes. In order to speed things up a little, I started by making up a sheet of walls which can be cut up and used as required...

The sheet of walls (left) and a single strip, showing interior and exterior detailing (right).

This will enable me to quickly produce a few pieces along the lines of this first one - a ruined house. It sits upon pavement next to a stone-flagged road complete with drains. Clearly, this was once a mighty civilisation.
I plan to create several houses, crumbling city walls, a watch tower and a few more big pieces too (more about those later...) The techniques are the same, regardless of the complexity of the design.

Black foam core forms the street, glued to a 10" record. At this point, I have not yet added theupper storey of the house.

Music connoiseurs might like to know that this piece was built upon a 10" recording of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians - 'Piano Magic'...

Plenty of ground cover, moss and weeds break up the outlines of the ruins and add to the feeling of age.

I opted for a very simple colour scheme, using just one base colour and one highlight colour, so that the more important characters and machines stand out well against the terrain. Having painted the walls and street, the rest of the ground was built up with modelling clay, grit, static grass and clump flock. the same colour scheme and technique was used for the temple...

The house, viewed from above.

The Ruined Temple of Jinaan T'Onnik...

Pieces are carved from green and white foam and inscribed with a pencil to create stonework.

The temple is a 12" piece. I opted for a sandstone colour for the project because I wanted a nice bright table, and so that the various ruinsstand out against my grey cliffs. (Yes - this means the stone was not locally quarried...)

The unpainted walls and painted obelisk.

The centrepiece of the temple is a giant black obelisk, inscribed with strange characters and capped with a golden point. Again, this contrasts with its surroundings and stands out nicely.

Grit is added after painting the walls. The obelisk is glued in place.

The unfinished temple from various angles.

The finished article.

The mosses on the tops of the ruins were built up with various tones of flock, static grass and tea leaves, then gently dabbed with red paint here and there.

The Ruined Temple of Jinaan-T'Onnik, viewed from above.

Anyway, I can't stay here, blogging away all day! There are more cliffs awaiting my attention and I want to bury Rolf Harris' Two Little Boys...

All The Best!