Tony Oliver has made some very effective ramshakle ruins for Mordheim. This is how he did it:
This is an example of Mordheim house blocks. There are built on modular bases designed to give the appearance of Mordheim in the winter. Note that houses with roofs always have half the building missing to allow the figures to be placed inside. I used small terrain items such as spiders, rats, flour sacks to distract you from noticing the missing walls.
For the base I used two Daycell 2mm (PVC-poli-expanded) and for the walls use three Daycell 2mm layers. For the columns I used balsa. For the details in the external wall I used cardboard. To do the bricks of the wall and the floor I used a ruler and a Tombo wood carving knife to do the horizontal and vertical lines. For the concrete structure I cut pieces of paper clip. And the details I used: Gargoyles (Games Workshop), a pipe section (Ainsty), exhaust (Turbien airplane model Revell).
Materials
To breakup the floors, I used textured paper to give a rubble look that models can still stand on.
| To texture the walls, I used Liquitex Acrylic Texture Gel Ceramic Stucco. This is a PVA with a fine sand. It gives a more even finish than sand with white glue. Liquitex make a range on these with different finishes. I found it at an art shop. (It is also great for figure bases where it textures the base while gluing the figure). |  |
Once built, I sprayed the entire model, including the base, black. Then I sprayed the interior walls white, trying to spray the walls only. I sprayed the floor boards with Citadel Bestial Brown.
Now for the snowy effect on the ground. I used two different texture spray cans made buy Dulux in their Speckle Spraypak range. One was Copperstone, applied first making sure I left a black halo around each building. Then a lesser amount of Powder White for unmelted snow. Both these paints have a substantial texture and are slightly motley in appearance. They dry to a hard, low sheen finish.
I then painted the walls and roofs using house paint samplers. These give a very natural look and are cheaper than modeller's paints.
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I like to add details like posters that I made on a computer with a colour printer; |
flour sacks made with Milliput ( a 2-part
epoxy available from most hobby shops); spider webs by leaving
the model in the garage for a while and letting a real spider
spin a web; barrels from beads of different sizes painted.
| To give the snow effect, I used a texture glue called Jo Sonja's Texture Paste on the window sills and against the walls. This glue is Australian made but I am sure there would be similar ones in the UK and USA. I asked at my local craft shop for a glue that would look like snow when it dried. This glue dries white, but is semi-transparent. The lady at the craft shop said it will yellow over time and recommended mixing white acrylic paint with it. (I didn't bother). Finally, I gave a light spray of white paint on the roofs and trees. |  |
