Making scenery: RUINS


Here is one building made without foam-board.


The Cafe Noir. The front wall and pavement are from the diorama which comes with the Matchbox German Sd.232 armoured car kit. I cut thick card to fill in the recesses on the rear side of the front wall, and plastered the gaps with wall-filler. The chunky brick walls are made from sections of wall cut from the ruined walls which come with the Matchbox Sd. 251/1 Hanomag half-track kit. These, I have painted light grey, then dry-brushed with brick red, and stained with black. Other walls are simply very thick card, textured with wall filler. The floor is strewn with cat litter rubble, black-painted broken matches, and textured with coloured wall filler.

The front wall shows the effect of mixing in black paint (I used enamel) with varnish. The pigment has settled in the crevices of the pavement, making them show up well, and has made the front sign look dirty. The back wall of the main room has been painted with poster paint, and this has been dry brushed with black in places, and washed with black in others, giving an interesting effect.


This is a model of a ruin, half-finished. The walls are foam board, and these have been glued to an over-size base, which will be trimmed later. You can see lots of plaster castings of rubble. I made moulds for outside corners, inside corners, straight sections, and blobs of fallen roofing for the central areas of ruins. You can see a fair selection here. I also made one mould for making little bits of flooring, with smashed planking and beams. You can just see one of these, glued into the top corner of the picture, half way up the walls.

The castings have all been fixed in place with mastic, which doubles as a filler for any gaps that might appear. I have also used the brown acrylic mastic to smooth the foam board's core on window ledges, and to fill in the void between castings that appears where there is a door hole in the building.

In all I made three outside corner moulds, two straights, and seven inside corners. The inside corners were the most useful, since two put together make a straight, and three together make an outside corner. Filling the moulds to differents depths when casting meant that I got a big range of sizes of rubble pile.


This shows you three finished masters for inside corners of rubble. They are made from modelling clay, Linka castings, old bits from spares boxes, cat litter, matchsticks, and bits of the base that used to come with the Airfix Forward Command Post kit. Each one has a flat bottom, which rests on the ice-cream tub lid, and two flat vertical sides, which are up against the walls of Lego. Before making the masters, I painted the Lego with Vaseline (petroleum jelly), to make it easy to separate them from the Lego afterwards. The Lego bricks make nice accurate right-angles for this purpose.


BACK TO BUILDINGS MENU

BACK TO SCENERY MENU             BACK TO MODELLING MENU

Click here to go back to the home page