Advanced ruined building

These advanced ruins are constructed using the method for basic ruins explained here. I will not repeat those methods here, so you'll have to look them up.

Tools and materials

Materials:

Thin cardboard, the type cereal packages are made of
Thick cardboard, about 5 mm thick should do the trick. This will be the main support for the whole structure, so don't use to flimsy material.
Strips of balsa wood. They should be 1 x 0,2 cm or something similar.
Various other small stuff to decorate the lot. In this example I've used shields from the old Empire spearmen, a small bottle from the Brettonian men-at-arms, various skulls and loads of small pieces of wood and cardboard I had lying around.
Small match sticks, any type will do.

Tools

Large knife, this is used for cutting the main structure and making the balsa wood the right length.
PVA glue, used to glue just about anything
Superglue, used to glue most of the decorations in place.
Sand, any type will do.

The basic construction

The basic construction was simply cutting Cardboard to size and constructing two houses that are connected by a walkway. I sadly have no pictures of the halfway process. Once the construction is finished use thick cardboard to glue in the floors. Remember to make them slightly smaller than you want the end-result to be.

More info on basic construction in the beginners guide.

The only difference is that I have now glued the base of the house on the inside. This is just as sturdy, but ensures I can line up the various houses with great easy to create a lane or city block.
Also I didn't base the house as a whole, but rather created several pieces, all with their own base. This gives me a great versatile building I can use in many different ways. Although not ready at the time I'm going to create a seperate staircase that can be placed at the end the walkway to free up one of the houses for a different use.

Decorating the inside

The decorations are done very similar to the decorating done in a normal house. But this time we use superiour materials, which require a bit more skill and time.

For the Base floor I still used the thin cardboard to create a 'tile' effect. This is also explained in the beginners guide.

The upper floors however are not simply decorated by using cardboard strips. For this project balsa
wood was used. First thing I did was cut the balsa wood to the approperiate size (the size of the floor where it will be, plus several mm). I actually did several strips at a time as this is faster.
Once cut to size one end is made to look snapped of. This should be done a bit differently for each strip.
After this the long, upper edges of the balsa wood are rounded to give the wood a worn look.

Repeat these steps for each floor.

Inside the walkway the balsa wood is slightly longer than the walkway. This ensures the gap made by the cardboard of the wall will be covered over. Another way to ensure this is to simply glue a match stick in the approperiate place. But I think this looks better.

After this is done It's time to liven up the inside and make this ruined building into a ruined home (eh, well... something like that anyway).

First thing I added was a book case. This was easy to create. I simply glued some balsa wood strips in the right order for the frame of the book case. Next I added some books. These were easily made out of thick card board. Just cut it to size and sand one of the edges to make the back of the book. Make several and simply glue them in place.

The open book was also easy to create, I cut a strip from the thick cardboard, about twice as long as the previous books (not that I used any type of measurements) and in the centre I cut about halfway through the cardboard and bent it slightly inward. This was to be the cover of the book. Next I took some thin cardboard and made the pages. I actually only made on page for each side, but this was enough to get the feeling of a real book.

After this, I glued the books in place and added a skull (you can never go wrong with a skull here and there)

In the other house I hung a small book shelve from the wall. I first cut the general shape out of balsa wood and added a few books to the whole.

On other parts of the floor I added various debree and sand. Various bits of wood, left over strips of balsa wood, small pebbles and litteraly anything I could get my hands on went into these rubble piles.
Don't over-do it on the rubble, because you want your models to be able to move inside these buildings. The amount of rubble shown in the pictures is about right. A bit more can be added, but generally less is more.

After this the inside of the building was as full as it was going to get.

Decorating the outdside

The outside of the house is also decorated with balsa wood. This is done in a few steps.

Step 1: Horizontal beams are created on the level of each floor of the building.

Step 2: a vertical beam is added to each side of the corners (this covers up the line in the cardboard structure).

Step 3: Add vertical beams next to all the windows.

Step 4: Add a horizontal match stick above and below each window.

This should be enough beams to create a full look on the outside of the building. If this is not the case (e.g. you have lesser windows) then add some diagonal beams to fill the gaps. It usually is a good idea to look at your building from a few feet away, as the 'blank' patches will be more visible at a distance.

The roofs and stones were created from small strips of thin cardboard. This should explain itself pretty much, but I have to tell you that creating the stone wall of the walkway took very long and I had almost given up on it. But in the end I just hung in there and the result is there. A much simpler way of doing this would have been using insulation board (article comming soon). But I didn't have any at the time.

As a last detail I stuck on some shields and a lions head from the original Mordheim box to give it some detail on the exterior.

After this the model was ready to be primed and painted.

Painting the ruin

First I put a basecoat of black on the whole house. After this almost the whole house (inside and out) was drybrushed using Bestial Brown. Beams, floors and walls. The only things that didn't get this drybrush were:
- Stone wall
- Shields
- Roofs

After this I drybrushed with snakebite leather (lightly on the beams, bookcase and such, but heavily on the walls). After this I drybrushed the walls to a lighter color using Bleached Bone.

Shields were simply painted Tin Bitz and then drybrushed dwarf bronze.

After the paint job the house was ready for playing with.

I mainly used cheap paints I got from a hobby store. It's generally not worth it to use your expensive GW paints on these large stuff. This is because most of it is drybrushed anyway. Only some small paints got a patch of GW paint and the walls had some GW paint on them.