Egyptian Ruins - Part 1

With my first order of my French in Egypt figures on the way, I have been looking at terrain pieces for use in future games. The plan is to make two middle eastern village houses, some ruins and some groups of palm trees. 

Since the weather on this Labour Day long weekend has been miserably cold and wet, ruining my plans to clean up the garden after a couple of months of neglect, I have started on the first item, the ruins.

The concept I have is based around this image I took at Karnak in 2009. 

I like the way that there is a mix of finished and unfinished surfaces on the pillars and walls.

I chose to make the base from foam board. I cut one face off the board and then drew the stone floor with a ball point pen. 

I used the same technique to create a raised floor in the centre of the piece and the walls at the front of the model.

I then painted all surfaces with PVA glue to harden up the foamboard surface.

Next was to made some pillars. For these I chose to use wine corks, of which I had a ready supply...a supply built up over a long time...honestly!

I found eight corks about the same size and shape and glued them into pairs as the basic pillar shape.

I also took one cork and cut it in three parts, then tore chunks off them. This will be a collapsed pillar. Four other corks will be used as partial pillar.  

To get that rough, broken finish that appears in the first photo on this page, I cut small pieces of thin cork sheeting and glued them to the column. 

When all of the pillars have had this applied, I will apply a finish to provide that partly finished look.