Mark Jones

Mark: To begin making the ruined buildings, you will need to download and print out the Osgiliath ruin templates, as featured in the UK issue 289 of White Dwarf.

Osgiliath Ruins Template: [Download PDF 151 Kb]

In order to download this document you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Download it for free from the Adobe site.

THE INNER WALLS
Glue them to a piece of sturdy card and cut them out. Trace around the templates onto a sheet of 5 mm thick foamboard. Cut out the inner walls using a craft knife and a steel ruler, remembering to take great care - modelling knives are extremely sharp! Carve the top edges of your walls with a craft knife, creating a worn down and damaged surface. Place the walls onto a large piece of MDF board, according to the diagram, and draw a flowing shape around them for the base. Take care to leave at least 10mm around the edges of the walls to make room for the outer brick walls. Take a jeweller’s saw and cut out the base. The outline of the base should be cut at an outward 45-degree angle, to create a bevelled edge. Glue the walls in place on the base using PVA woodwork glue.

THE OUTER WALLS
Measure out lines 10 mm apart on the textured side of the ceiling tile. Then draw on the brick pattern, making sure it’s irregular. This will make the brick pattern look more realistic. Cut the tile into strips 4 bricks wide. Score the brick pattern with your craft knife, again taking extreme care, and be careful not to cut it all the way through. Glue the outer walls to the inner walls, with the textured side facing outward. Cut the edges where the walls meet on the corners at a 45-degree angle, so that the brick pattern continues uninterrupted.

Cut out the windows in the outer walls by taking your craft knife and cutting into the outer walls, using the windows in the inner walls as a guide. Crumble the edges of the outer wall to resemble broken rock. Try to keep the outer wall slightly higher than the inner wall. Keep the bits you’ve crumbled off, so you can use them as rubble later on. Glue bits of left-over polystyrene bricks around the ruin. Mark has also used the ruins from The Return of The King boxed game, which adds a nice level of detail. Take some sand and gravel and glue it to the base of the model using slightly watered down PVA woodowork glue.

After the PVA woodowork glue has thoroughly dried, paint the model with textured paint. After that has dried, the scores in the brickwork may need to be re-defined. The easiest way to do this is to take a sharp pencil and follow the lines of the bricks.

PAINTING THE MODEL
Spray the ruin with Chaos Black undercoat and give it a heavy drybrush with Codex Grey. Drybrush the model again with Fortress Grey and finally with Skull White. You can give the ruins a weathered effect by carefully drybrushing Scorched Brown and Dark Angels Green around the base of the walls and heaps of rubble. For a final touch you can add some small tufts of static grass to the base.

You don’t need to stick to the shape and design that we have used for our example, you can use the basic construction techniques to create a large amount of different ruins. With a little creativity you can expand on these techniques as well. Just think about adding in ruined staircases or even multiple storeys of buildings. The best thing to do is to have a go and let your imagination run wild.

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