Mordheim

I’ve narrowed my pile of rubble down into three main colors.

Before this Mordheim tower was destroyed, it stood four stories tall, and was made of gray cement. This gray color is definitely going to be the most prominent color in my pile of rubble.

The next most prominent material in my Voltaire’s Magic Shop is wood. Each floor and all of the stair cases were made of wood and although many of the loose pieces of weed have been hauled off by travelers to build ladders, mend fences and make shields, there is still a good portion of wood sticking out from the rubble. There are two main types of wood here. The first is the weathered, darker wood from the framing on the outside of the building. The second is the lighter wood from the interior of the tower. This wood didn’t have to endure the years of harsh weather before being knocked over by a comet.

The last color is the color on the outside of the tower/building. This color will only be on a few sections of the cement. I still haven’t made a final decision on what color I’m going to paint this building, so this color is up in the air.

I will be painting my pile of rubble (along with the building) in this order. So here we start with the gray cement. Here is the first coat of dark gray:

I will need to finish up this tower by the end of February, so look for a good number of posts from me on this project in the near future.
-Ashton Sanders

I have successfully painted my entire collapsed Mordheim black! I couldn’t use spray paint because most of it is built with styrofoam, so I grabbed my largest brush, and watered down a lot of black paint, and got started. Here’s some pictures of my freshly painted black undercoat:

And here is a picture of it now that it has dried. (I’ve also spent about an hour doing touch ups and getting black paint deep into the crevices.

For this Mordheim building, I am planning on letting a lot of the black paint show through on the final product, so I definitely had to make sure every millimeter of this piece of terrain was base painted.

Ashton Sanders

I now have two Mordheim terrain buildings that I will be painting soon. I wasn’t too excited about the wall color on my first Mordheim Building, so I thought I’d do some testing first. Here are some sample paint jobs I’ve done on my Destroyed Mordheim Church. I’ve already shown these pictures to a number of people, and so far, Green has gotten the most votes. Let me know what you think:

Green:

Brown:

Yellow:

Thanks in Advance,
Ashton

I have finally decided on what my collapsed tower used to house:

Many people don’t know that before Voltaire became famous as an author, he owned a very profitable chain of Magic Shops in Mordheim. Until, of course, the comet killed all within the city. Fortunately for Voltaire (and literature), he was spending the new year with his family in a neighboring village when Mordheim was destroyed. This tower used to be Voltaire’s research tower where he developed many of his magic potions. This is also where he gained his first love of writing.

=]
Ashton Sanders

I’ve started the base coat for my Church of the Broken Window. I have a couple more patches to paint, and then I’ll start on the next layers.

I should have more updates soon,
Ashton

Here’s some tips to making a realistic looking pile of rubble!

Most of the work I’ve been doing on this tower is detailing the pile of rubble. I noticed that on this competition entry on TerraGenesis.com, they made a pile of rubble to cover the batteries for the LED lights. This is the pile that he made:

To me, this is a pretty ugly pile. I found that the reason is because the pieces of wood are on top of the gravel as opposed to in the pile. So I started making sure that my pile of rubble was very realistic. I’ve done about 4 hours of detailing work on my pile of rubble to make it look as real as possible. I’ve been filling in any deep crevices with glue and pieces of wood and foam. I filled the holes with glue and then covered it all with sand. After it dried, I shook off all the excess sand.

Here’s some pictures of the updates:

I also added a destroyed window frame to the rubble, You can see it still attached to a piece of wall in the rubble.

Here is a close up of the collapsed tower roof.

Here is a close up of the pile of rubble at the base of the building.

I hope this will help you to make great piles of rubble. =]

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

I have been working on my collapsed tower for some time now. I’ve gotten a couple comments mentioning how the roof of the tower, which fell four stories and crashed into the ground, is not destroyed enough. This is how it looked when I first create it:

That obviously is not a roof that fell four stories, so I decided to fix that. Here is the process I took to destroy my perfectly good Mordheim Roof.

Then I glued it bent the detached section and glued it back into place:

Now I just have to do a little bit of detailing to make it fit in perfectly.

I hope you have a Happy New Year this 2008!
Ashton Sanders

Since my last post about adding bases to buildings, I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I’ve compiled more points, and put them below:

Good Things About Using a Base on Your Buildings and Terrain:

1. Stability: With a base, you don’t even have to worry about the stability of your large building. Just glue it down.
2. Debris and Junk: Read the Rest of the Post >

The building that I am currently working on for my Mordheim Terrain is a four story tower that has fallen over into a pile of rubble. This creates quite a long terrain piece that I am building without a base.

The biggest problem with creating this Mordheim building without a base is support. If I am not careful, after all my work, it will just break in half. There are a couple things I am doing to take care of this:

First, I’ve created, and glued into place, a Popsicle stick brace that supports the building from inside the foam. The idea behind this is similar to having rebar inside of cement walls. Here is a picture of the bottom of my terrain:

The weakest part of my terrain is on the left side of the Popsicle brace. Where the rubble meets the first floor of the building.

Second, I’ve added fallen debris that acts as support beams.

There are three sticks that look like they have just fallen over in the debris, but are actually embedded deep within the main building and glued securely to the rubble.

Lastly, I am going to create a couple piles of rubble right next to the main floor which will also add support to the weak point on my piece of terrain.

I’ve done a lot of work on the roof of the tower as well. You can see the broken chimney in this picture:

Merry Christmas,
Ashton Sanders

Over the last week, I’ve been trying to create a system to create small Mordheim roof tiles that look good. Most scratch-built Mordheim buildings these days have 1/2″ to 1″ wide roof tiles which translates to 2.5 – 5 feet wide. Which, by the way, is completely ridiculous. After lots of fiddling with different types of material for my roof tiles, I tore off my old Mordheim Roof and created a new one from card stock.

This is the process I created to make the Mordheim roof tiles:

1. Cut a strip of card stock 1.1 cm wide.
2. Cut slits along one side to create the different tiles.
3. Then I cut off the ends of most of the tiles to give each tile a different length.
4. Then for to show wear, I bent the tiles and chipped the corners of every other tile.

Here’s an image of the different steps:

As you can see the completed strip has as much character as I could think of adding (without paint). So I went ahead and cut up almost an entire 8×11″ piece of paper and glued them down on the roof of my competition building:

Here’s the other side:

Note the two holes I added to create the leaky roof. I think this came out looking very well. I only have one row of tiles along the peak of the roof to add, and This section of roof should be done.

The only short-coming with using card stock is that it will soak up the paint and become wet. Hopefully it won’t “melt” together and loose it’s shape.

More to come,
Ashton Sanders