An Age of Sigmar graveyard using the Garden of Morr

With a bit of luck I got my hands on a used Garden of Morr kit. As I had already prepared some bases and green stuffed some gravestones I was ready to make an interesting graveyard to surround my Vampire Counts castle with.

Graveyard covered in dirt and ready for a last layer of PVA and a base coat.

Vampire Counts castle, finishing touches

With the weekend over, I can look back at finishing the last bits of the castle. Next step is waiting for it to dry and base coating everything. At the start of the weekend I decided to keep the second bridge simple, and now it easily connects the two hills leading up to the castle.

A bridge and a drawbridge lead up tot the castle. The middle hill and the simple bridge can be removed to decrease the size of the castle on the table, or I can make a long line filling an entire table with the castle.

Building a castle roof and more details

Detailing a large project is important and time consuming. The castle stands on the living room table and I try to put a few hours work in every day to get it to the point where I can start painting it (almost there). I put up a few more corpses.

You decorate your home with my friend, you'd better be a vampire! Oh you are...oh oh....

Detailing my wargaming castle

As for all things in wargaming terrain the devil is in the details. So I expect to be spending quite a number of hobby hours on detailing the shape of the castle I have built. First thing was making a gate wall between the two large towers that form the entrance.

Sealing terrain with PVA

Only a short update on this project today. Yesterday evenings work is more or less dry so I could hold the castle and the other bits upside down today to remove excess sand. After that I covered everything in a mix of about 9 parts water, 1 part PVA. This helps seal sand and other things and makes it stick to the model. The bits of polystyrene that are not covered after this (and there always are) will still melt on spray painting the primer, but that will usually just make it look cooler (IMHO). I took everything inside hoping it will dry somewhere in my lifetime (hopefully by Sunday).

Sand and mud on Age of Sigmar terrain

Another evening dawned, it was raining outside and I was working in the shed getting ready to toss a bucket-load of insta-filler and pva glue (both mercifully cheap at the local Action) at my work in progress. I want to spray paint my polystyrene and that means it needs to be well sealed off. You can do this by covering it in PVA glue cut with water (a 50/50 mix will do). But as I also wanted to make my cliffs look like cliffs instead of haphazardly glued polystyrene I need some insta-filler too It gives a nice texture and if you mix it with PVA it becomes rather strong and easy to paint. I made a mix consisting of about equal parts of water (for ease of applying), PVA and insta-filler and threw in a bit of beach sand because I was feeling creative and adventurous. I covered deep gaps and seriously sloppy work with a bit of pure insta-filler and covered it with my mix later.

Building a polystyrene wargaming hill or cliff

With the bases ready and the plan in place it is time to build up the cliff and the castle. The proces for this is quite simple. I have a few large blocks of dense polystyrene (never ever ever ever use the white bubbly stuff! In my experience it will destroy itself during gaming no matter how well you seal it off with glue and insta-filler). Just grab a very sharp knife cut of a (~10 cm) wide strip of polystyrene, and divide it into smaller chunks (~10cm x 10cm). Cut a few smaller bits of and make sure to always cut of the edges and points of each block. Then get your hot glue gun ready and start fixing the block to the table (yes hot glue melts polystyrene but not by enough to make me care and its almost instant drying time allows you to work at speed).

First of was the upper cliff bit for the keep itself. I made it first because the workbench was still empty at that point. Next up were the the ascend piece and the cliff bit, also because of workspace consideration. Last up was the big cliff and the castle.

I marked of the ascend in the corners by gluing a few 10x10cm blocks atop each other (2 for the start and first corner, and 3 for the second corner).  and I cut one larger piece diagonally to make the ascend out of one piece. That prepared I let my mind wander as I glued pieces of polystyrene on top of other pieces. I marked out space for a large mysterious cave entrance to one side and made sure to glue supports for the building on the inside. Here are a few work in progress shots.

Making MDF bases for terrain and green stuff details

So enough time has been spent daydreaming and planning. This week I actually started on the build. Step #1 sculpting some gravestones over lunch because my castle will need to be surrounded by a large (huge) graveyard.

Planning wargame terraing and mood board

Last post was about some general consideration, today it is time to talk about planning and my mood board. First I have just started sketching in a nice sketchbook I bought for the purpose. It will serve as my collection of blank paper to scribble on and if all goes well I can actually find older inspiration when there's time to build a new project (Aqshy gaming table plan, I'm looking at you!).

Anyway here are my first castle scribbles. If you can't follow along, don't worry, I sometimes can't follow myself. It basically consists of some possible designs integrating parts of a castle I found in the thrift store.

The notes:

4 questions to ask if you want playable wargames terrain

My Vampire Counts are in dire need of a castle to (un)live in. Also with Armies on Parade still four months away I actually have time to get a head plan and build a nice big centerpiece of terrain. With all terrain I make, I aim for things that a) look cool and b) are playable.

a) Look cool
Getting point a) takes a bit of creativity with stuff found in thrift stores and cheap stuff outlets like the local Action store here. Getting a few bits with interesting looking textures goes a long way if you want to transform polystyrene and dirt into miniature terrain.In preparation I always scout around the internet to make my own personal 'mood board' for new terrain. Just google a general term for whatever you're trying to build and pull a number of nice pictures of the internet for reference. For my upcoming project the search will be 'vampire castle'. Yeah searching is not a very difficult activity.

b) Playable 
Making playable terrain is often overlooked by enthusiast terrain builders.  For instance this manufactorum I build a few years ago looks (imho) quite nice.

Here we go

Let's attempt to make a nice irregular blog with updates on my painting and scenery building skills with a few battle reports added in where possible. For now here is a quick snap of Arbaal the Undefeated, painted up about a year ago:

If possible I will be adding some back-dated articles of older projects.