Miniature Domain - Painting and Converting

Ruined buildings

Making a ruined building isn't as hard as it seems. It's also very cheap to do, since all of the materials needed are normally just thrown away with the rest of the garbage..

Tools and materials

The Basic house

Materials:

Thin cardboard. (From which cereal packages are made)
Corrugated cardboard. (Bigger boxes are made from this)
Some tape (You should use tape you can paint over)
Sand (Any sand will actually do, just remember to dry it before doing anything with it, because clumps of mud won't work)

Tools:

Small kife (make sure it's sharp)
Some PVA glue (normally use for gluing wood)
Some multi-purpose filler (Or a mix of sand and PVA glue if you don't have filler)

the basic house

Building a ruined house isn't a very precise modeling course, so you don't really need a perfectly worked out idea of what you're going to do, but a general idea is always useful.

The building in this example is the simplest building you can have, because all that's left is one corner and a piece of roof. Because this isn't very challenging to read about the house does have all the options you would like to include in a larger project such as roof tiles and wooden floors.

The first things to make are of course the walls. This is the easy bit, just cut them out of the corrugated cardboard and make sure the walls are straight where the corner(s) of the building will be and that they are crumbled everywhere else. Cut out the windows and door, this should be done very precisely, because if the doors and windows look crooked the whole house isn't going to be convincing. Once this is completed stick it together with the tape. Next fill up the gaps in the cardboard with filler or the PVA/sand mix.

Then put on two supporting cardboard pieces for the roof. Don't make them to thick, because you don't want to see them later on. Then cut a whole bunch of small square pieces of cardboard for the roof tiles. Stick these in rows onto the roof. This doesn't need to be very neat, because we're making a ruined building.

The Decorations

There you have the basic shape of a house, next comes the fun bit: the decorating of the house. First we'll want to increase the posts of the door. Do this by simply cutting a few strips of cardboard and placing them around the door.

The windows are a bit trickier because these will have some bars in them. Just cut the shape of them out of some cardboard and you'll have the windows used for the house in the pictures on this page. If you want to add some larger windows (e.g. when building a church) you'll want to have some build-up on them so cut the same shape again but now make all the bars 1 millimeter smaller. This will create the effect show in the picture below.

The corner stones were simply cut out of some thick cardboard like you find on the back of blocks of writing-paper. Also the line of stones between the first and second floor were added to make the house look a bit more stylish.

Next some bits of left-over sprue were cut up and placed on some parts of the base to look like piles of stones that fell of the building.

All the floors were then decorated with 'cardboard' wood. In effect small strips of cardboard were cut out and stuck onto the floor. For the outside of the house some small tiles were cut and glued onto the base.

Painting the house

Finally the house was painted using dark colors to add to the atmosphere of the game.

The house was sprayed with a black basecoat.
The windows, lose stones and cornerstones were drybrushed with codex grey.
The walls were drybrushed with scab Red and then a small highlight (barelly visible) with blood Red was added.
The wooden floors and roof were drybrushed with bestial brown and bubonic brown for the high lights.
The tiles on the base of the house were very lightly drybrushed with codex grey.
The last thing to do was add a bit of static grass on a few places on the base.

the final result