Graveyard Scatter Terrain

Welcome back to the Vault! My summer holiday has given me the luxury of extra hobby and gaming time and I've spent some of it working on a little modelling and painting project I'd like to share. 

Earlier in the year I had indulged my terrain addiction with the acquisition of the Garden of Morr kit from Games Workshop; this is a lovely gothic graveyard set, but once I had built it I felt the set would benefit from the addition of some scatter pieces to bulk it out. Blotz produce packs of laser cut MDF gravestones, so I thought I'd give these a go!

The finished article

I thought I'd post a few pictures I took along the way as this was a fun (and cheap-ish!) project.

I forgot to take pics of the MDF sheets, the packaging will have to do.

There are 17 gravestones in each pack (and I bought two). Very easy to remove from the sheet (I just used clippers) and a small amount of cleaning/trimming was required.  Some of the cross pieces are delicate so a little care was required.

Assembly was very easy (insert the stone into the base for the majority of the pieces), with good fits all round. I use Screwfix No Nonsense superglue as it is cheap as chips and has a quick dry time.

I then arranged the stones across a number of bases until I was happy with the set up and then glued them in place.

Bases 1 to 3

Bases 4 to 5

The bases actually started out as boards for fancy cakes, like this:

The cake is a lie

I was given a bunch of these some time ago and have found them useful for similar projects in the past. The foil and backing paper needs to be removed but this is pretty easy using steam (a lesson learnt removing wood chip wall paper from the lounge wall which is a bitch to remove otherwise). But please take care if you are steaming stuff, IT'S HOT!  

So these bases were freebies for me, but I noticed one of the boards had 41p written on the back; I need to find this cheap bakery supply shop. And I decided to be similarly Scrooge-like when it came to the paint. I had this stuff left over from my Frostgrave dungeon terrain build:

Fifty shades of grey (if you get your mixing right)

I think these squeezy bottles full of paint are like a quid each; just mix up a nice dark grey and then add more white for lighter tones as needed.  Nothing complicated.

OK, may be 3 shades of grey

And the same 3 here :P

I used GW Ulthuan Grey for the edge highlights; it is bright enough to make the stones pop.  The bases were given a slap of the hobby black paint, then covered with a thin coat of GW Charadon Granite; this will suffice as a neutral basing colour until I decide on a coherent basing scheme for all these pieces.

And done

And overhead shot.

So I'm pretty happy with this project; quick to do, and will be useful for a number of games/systems.

This hasn't been my only hobby/gaming activities this week; I've managed to play 2 (gasp!) games of 40K (I'm loving the Dark Eldar in the new edition), as well as some D&D. I've even made a decision about the models I want to use in the clubs upcoming Black Ops games...

Spectre Games minis

These are lovely models and deserve way more time (and better quality paint) than the gravestones! I'll talk a bit more about these next time. Thanks for reading as always.